Abstract:Neural Surface Reconstruction has become a standard methodology for indoor 3D reconstruction, with Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) proving particularly effective for representing scene geometry. A variety of applications require a detailed understanding of the scene context, driving the need for object-level semantic signals. While recent methods successfully integrate semantic labels, they often inherit the slow training time and limited scalability of multi-SDF learning. In this paper, we introduce FSTM, a unified approach for learning geometry and semantics through a two-step process: a geometry warm-up using RGB inputs and geometric cues, followed by semantic field estimation. By first optimising geometry without semantic supervision, we observe substantial improvements compared to the standard joint optimisation. Rather than relying on specialised modules or complex multi-SDF designs, FSTM shows that a streamlined formulation is sufficient to achieve strong geometric and semantic reconstructions. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world indoor datasets show that our method outperforms multi-SDF approaches. It trains 2.3x faster on Replica, improves robustness to real-world imperfections on ScanNet++, and achieves higher recall by recovering the surfaces of more objects in the scene. The code will be made available at https://remichierchia.github.io/FSTM.
Abstract:Using accurate depth priors in 3D Gaussian Splatting helps mitigate artifacts caused by sparse training data and textureless surfaces. However, acquiring accurate depth maps requires specialized acquisition systems. Foundation monocular depth estimation models offer a cost-effective alternative, but they suffer from scale ambiguity, multi-view inconsistency, and local geometric inaccuracies, which can degrade rendering performance when applied naively. This paper addresses the challenge of reliably leveraging monocular depth priors for Gaussian Splatting (GS) rendering enhancement. To this end, we introduce a training framework integrating scale-ambiguous and noisy depth priors into geometric supervision. We highlight the importance of learning from weakly aligned depth variations. We introduce a method to isolate ill-posed geometry for selective monocular depth regularization, restricting the propagation of depth inaccuracies into well-reconstructed 3D structures. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets show consistent improvements in geometric accuracy, leading to more faithful depth estimation and higher rendering quality across different GS variants and monocular depth backbones tested.
Abstract:Chronic wound monitoring and management require accurate and efficient wound measurement methods. This paper presents a fast, non-invasive 3D wound measurement algorithm based on RGB-D imaging. The method combines RGB-D odometry with B-spline surface reconstruction to generate detailed 3D wound meshes, enabling automatic computation of clinically relevant wound measurements such as perimeter, surface area, and dimensions. We evaluated our system on realistic silicone wound phantoms and measured sub-millimetre 3D reconstruction accuracy compared with high-resolution ground-truth scans. The extracted measurements demonstrated low variability across repeated captures and strong agreement with manual assessments. The proposed pipeline also outperformed a state-of-the-art object-centric RGB-D reconstruction method while maintaining runtimes suitable for real-time clinical deployment. Our approach offers a promising tool for automated wound assessment in both clinical and remote healthcare settings.
Abstract:We introduce neural cortical maps, a continuous and compact neural representation for cortical feature maps, as an alternative to traditional discrete structures such as grids and meshes. It can learn from meshes of arbitrary size and provide learnt features at any resolution. Neural cortical maps enable efficient optimization on the sphere and achieve runtimes up to 30 times faster than classic barycentric interpolation (for the same number of iterations). As a proof of concept, we investigate rigid registration of cortical surfaces and propose NC-Reg, a novel iterative algorithm that involves the use of neural cortical feature maps, gradient descent optimization and a simulated annealing strategy. Through ablation studies and subject-to-template experiments, our method demonstrates sub-degree accuracy ($<1^\circ$ from the global optimum), and serves as a promising robust pre-alignment strategy, which is critical in clinical settings.
Abstract:Variational autoencoders (VAE) encode data into lower-dimensional latent vectors before decoding those vectors back to data. Once trained, one can hope to detect out-of-distribution (abnormal) latent vectors, but several issues arise when the latent space is high dimensional. This includes an exponential growth of the hypervolume with the dimension, which severely affects the generative capacity of the VAE. In this paper, we draw insights from high dimensional statistics: in these regimes, the latent vectors of a standard VAE are distributed on the `equators' of a hypersphere, challenging the detection of anomalies. We propose to formulate the latent variables of a VAE using hyperspherical coordinates, which allows compressing the latent vectors towards a given direction on the hypersphere, thereby allowing for a more expressive approximate posterior. We show that this improves both the fully unsupervised and OOD anomaly detection ability of the VAE, achieving the best performance on the datasets we considered, outperforming existing methods. For the unsupervised and OOD modalities, respectively, these are: i) detecting unusual landscape from the Mars Rover camera and unusual Galaxies from ground based imagery (complex, real world datasets); ii) standard benchmarks like Cifar10 and subsets of ImageNet as the in-distribution (ID) class.
Abstract:Wound care is often challenged by the economic and logistical burdens that consistently afflict patients and hospitals worldwide. In recent decades, healthcare professionals have sought support from computer vision and machine learning algorithms. In particular, wound segmentation has gained interest due to its ability to provide professionals with fast, automatic tissue assessment from standard RGB images. Some approaches have extended segmentation to 3D, enabling more complete and precise healing progress tracking. However, inferring multi-view consistent 3D structures from 2D images remains a challenge. In this paper, we evaluate WoundNeRF, a NeRF SDF-based method for estimating robust wound segmentations from automatically generated annotations. We demonstrate the potential of this paradigm in recovering accurate segmentations by comparing it against state-of-the-art Vision Transformer networks and conventional rasterisation-based algorithms. The code will be released to facilitate further development in this promising paradigm.




Abstract:Managing chronic wounds remains a major healthcare challenge, with clinical assessment often relying on subjective and time-consuming manual documentation methods. Although 2D digital videometry frameworks aided the measurement process, these approaches struggle with perspective distortion, a limited field of view, and an inability to capture wound depth, especially in anatomically complex or curved regions. To overcome these limitations, we present Wound3DAssist, a practical framework for 3D wound assessment using monocular consumer-grade videos. Our framework generates accurate 3D models from short handheld smartphone video recordings, enabling non-contact, automatic measurements that are view-independent and robust to camera motion. We integrate 3D reconstruction, wound segmentation, tissue classification, and periwound analysis into a modular workflow. We evaluate Wound3DAssist across digital models with known geometry, silicone phantoms, and real patients. Results show that the framework supports high-quality wound bed visualization, millimeter-level accuracy, and reliable tissue composition analysis. Full assessments are completed in under 20 minutes, demonstrating feasibility for real-world clinical use.




Abstract:Managing chronic wounds is a global challenge that can be alleviated by the adoption of automatic systems for clinical wound assessment from consumer-grade videos. While 2D image analysis approaches are insufficient for handling the 3D features of wounds, existing approaches utilizing 3D reconstruction methods have not been thoroughly evaluated. To address this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive study on 3D wound reconstruction from consumer-grade videos. Specifically, we introduce the SALVE dataset, comprising video recordings of realistic wound phantoms captured with different cameras. Using this dataset, we assess the accuracy and precision of state-of-the-art methods for 3D reconstruction, ranging from traditional photogrammetry pipelines to advanced neural rendering approaches. In our experiments, we observe that photogrammetry approaches do not provide smooth surfaces suitable for precise clinical measurements of wounds. Neural rendering approaches show promise in addressing this issue, advancing the use of this technology in wound care practices.




Abstract:Neural Rendering representations have significantly contributed to the field of 3D computer vision. Given their potential, considerable efforts have been invested to improve their performance. Nonetheless, the essential question of selecting training views is yet to be thoroughly investigated. This key aspect plays a vital role in achieving high-quality results and aligns with the well-known tenet of deep learning: "garbage in, garbage out". In this paper, we first illustrate the importance of view selection by demonstrating how a simple rotation of the test views within the most pervasive NeRF dataset can lead to consequential shifts in the performance rankings of state-of-the-art techniques. To address this challenge, we introduce a unified framework for view selection methods and devise a thorough benchmark to assess its impact. Significant improvements can be achieved without leveraging error or uncertainty estimation but focusing on uniform view coverage of the reconstructed object, resulting in a training-free approach. Using this technique, we show that high-quality renderings can be achieved faster by using fewer views. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic datasets and realistic data to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared with random, conventional error-based, and uncertainty-guided view selection.
Abstract:Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have exhibited potential in synthesizing high-fidelity views of 3D scenes but the standard training paradigm of NeRF presupposes an equal importance for each image in the training set. This assumption poses a significant challenge for rendering specific views presenting intricate geometries, thereby resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we take a closer look at the implications of the current training paradigm and redesign this for more superior rendering quality by NeRFs. Dividing input views into multiple groups based on their visual similarities and training individual models on each of these groups enables each model to specialize on specific regions without sacrificing speed or efficiency. Subsequently, the knowledge of these specialized models is aggregated into a single entity via a teacher-student distillation paradigm, enabling spatial efficiency for online render-ing. Empirically, we evaluate our novel training framework on two publicly available datasets, namely NeRF synthetic and Tanks&Temples. Our evaluation demonstrates that our DaC training pipeline enhances the rendering quality of a state-of-the-art baseline model while exhibiting convergence to a superior minimum.