Hierarchical Scoring with 3D Gaussian Splatting for Instance Image-Goal Navigation

Instance Image-Goal Navigation (IIN) requires autonomous agents to identify and navigate to a target object or location depicted in a reference image captured from any viewpoint. While recent methods leverage powerful novel view synthesis (NVS) techniques, such as three-dimensional Gaussian splatting (3DGS), they typically rely on randomly sampling multiple viewpoints or trajectories to ensure comprehensive coverage of discriminative visual cues. This approach, however, creates significant redundancy through overlapping image samples and lacks principled view selection, substantially increasing both rendering and comparison overhead. In this paper, we introduce a novel IIN framework with a hierarchical scoring paradigm that estimates optimal viewpoints for target matching. Our approach integrates cross-level semantic scoring, utilizing CLIP-derived relevancy fields to identify regions with high semantic similarity to the target object class, with fine-grained local geometric scoring that performs precise pose estimation within promising regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on simulated IIN benchmarks and real-world applicability.

Learning Bijective Surface Parameterization for Inferring Signed Distance Functions from Sparse Point Clouds with Grid Deformation

Inferring signed distance functions (SDFs) from sparse point clouds remains a challenge in surface reconstruction. The key lies in the lack of detailed geometric information in sparse point clouds, which is essential for learning a continuous field. To resolve this issue, we present a novel approach that learns a dynamic deformation network to predict SDFs in an end-to-end manner. To parameterize a continuous surface from sparse points, we propose a bijective surface parameterization (BSP) that learns the global shape from local patches. Specifically, we construct a bijective mapping for sparse points from the parametric domain to 3D local patches, integrating patches into the global surface. Meanwhile, we introduce grid deformation optimization (GDO) into the surface approximation to optimize the deformation of grid points and further refine the parametric surfaces. Experimental results on synthetic and real scanned datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://takeshie.github.io/Bijective-SDF

GaussianUDF: Inferring Unsigned Distance Functions through 3D Gaussian Splatting

Reconstructing open surfaces from multi-view images is vital in digitalizing complex objects in daily life. A widely used strategy is to learn unsigned distance functions (UDFs) by checking if their appearance conforms to the image observations through neural rendering. However, it is still hard to learn continuous and implicit UDF representations through 3D Gaussians splatting (3DGS) due to the discrete and explicit scene representation, i.e., 3D Gaussians. To resolve this issue, we propose a novel approach to bridge the gap between 3D Gaussians and UDFs. Our key idea is to overfit thin and flat 2D Gaussian planes on surfaces, and then, leverage the self-supervision and gradient-based inference to supervise unsigned distances in both near and far area to surfaces. To this end, we introduce novel constraints and strategies to constrain the learning of 2D Gaussians to pursue more stable optimization and more reliable self-supervision, addressing the challenges brought by complicated gradient field on or near the zero level set of UDFs. We report numerical and visual comparisons with the state-of-the-art on widely used benchmarks and real data to show our advantages in terms of accuracy, efficiency, completeness, and sharpness of reconstructed open surfaces with boundaries. Project page: https://lisj575.github.io/GaussianUDF/

FatesGS: Fast and Accurate Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction using Gaussian Splatting with Depth-Feature Consistency

Recently, Gaussian Splatting has sparked a new trend in the field of computer vision. Apart from novel view synthesis, it has also been extended to the area of multi-view reconstruction. The latest methods facilitate complete, detailed surface reconstruction while ensuring fast training speed. However, these methods still require dense input views, and their output quality significantly degrades with sparse views. We observed that the Gaussian primitives tend to overfit the few training views, leading to noisy floaters and incomplete reconstruction surfaces. In this paper, we present an innovative sparse-view reconstruction framework that leverages intra-view depth and multi-view feature consistency to achieve remarkably accurate surface reconstruction. Specifically, we utilize monocular depth ranking information to supervise the consistency of depth distribution within patches and employ a smoothness loss to enhance the continuity of the distribution. To achieve finer surface reconstruction, we optimize the absolute position of depth through multi-view projection features. Extensive experiments on DTU and BlendedMVS demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a speedup of 60x to 200x, achieving swift and fine-grained mesh reconstruction without the need for costly pre-training.

Sparis: Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction of Indoor Scenes from Sparse Views

In recent years, reconstructing indoor scene geometry from multi-view images has achieved encouraging accomplishments. Current methods incorporate monocular priors into neural implicit surface models to achieve high-quality reconstructions. However, these methods require hundreds of images for scene reconstruction. When only a limited number of views are available as input, the performance of monocular priors deteriorates due to scale ambiguity, leading to the collapse of the reconstructed scene geometry. In this paper, we propose a new method, named Sparis, for indoor surface reconstruction from sparse views. Specifically, we investigate the impact of monocular priors on sparse scene reconstruction, introducing a novel prior based on inter-image matching information. Our prior offers more accurate depth information while ensuring cross-view matching consistency. Additionally, we employ an angular filter strategy and an epipolar matching weight function, aiming to reduce errors due to view matching inaccuracies, thereby refining the inter-image prior for improved reconstruction accuracy. The experiments conducted on widely used benchmarks demonstrate superior performance in sparse-view scene reconstruction.

Sharpening Neural Implicit Functions with Frequency Consolidation Priors

Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) are vital implicit representations to represent high fidelity 3D surfaces. Current methods mainly leverage a neural network to learn an SDF from various supervisions including signed distances, 3D point clouds, or multi-view images. However, due to various reasons including the bias of neural network on low frequency content, 3D unaware sampling, sparsity in point clouds, or low resolutions of images, neural implicit representations still struggle to represent geometries with high frequency components like sharp structures, especially for the ones learned from images or point clouds. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a method to sharpen a low frequency SDF observation by recovering its high frequency components, pursuing a sharper and more complete surface. Our key idea is to learn a mapping from a low frequency observation to a full frequency coverage in a data-driven manner, leading to a prior knowledge of shape consolidation in the frequency domain, dubbed frequency consolidation priors. To better generalize a learned prior to unseen shapes, we introduce to represent frequency components as embeddings and disentangle the embedding of the low frequency component from the embedding of the full frequency component. This disentanglement allows the prior to generalize on an unseen low frequency observation by simply recovering its full frequency embedding through a test-time self-reconstruction. Our evaluations under widely used benchmarks or real scenes show that our method can recover high frequency component and produce more accurate surfaces than the latest methods. The code, data, and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/chenchao15/FCP}.

MultiPull: Detailing Signed Distance Functions by Pulling Multi-Level Queries at Multi-Step

Reconstructing a continuous surface from a raw 3D point cloud is a challenging task. Recent methods usually train neural networks to overfit on single point clouds to infer signed distance functions (SDFs). However, neural networks tend to smooth local details due to the lack of ground truth signed distances or normals, which limits the performance of overfitting-based methods in reconstruction tasks. To resolve this issue, we propose a novel method, named MultiPull, to learn multi-scale implicit fields from raw point clouds by optimizing accurate SDFs from coarse to fine. We achieve this by mapping 3D query points into a set of frequency features, which makes it possible to leverage multi-level features during optimization. Meanwhile, we introduce optimization constraints from the perspective of spatial distance and normal consistency, which play a key role in point cloud reconstruction based on multi-scale optimization strategies. Our experiments on widely used object and scene benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in surface reconstruction.

DiffGS: Functional Gaussian Splatting Diffusion

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown convincing performance in rendering speed and fidelity, yet the generation of Gaussian Splatting remains a challenge due to its discreteness and unstructured nature. In this work, we propose DiffGS, a general Gaussian generator based on latent diffusion models. DiffGS is a powerful and efficient 3D generative model which is capable of generating Gaussian primitives at arbitrary numbers for high-fidelity rendering with rasterization. The key insight is to represent Gaussian Splatting in a disentangled manner via three novel functions to model Gaussian probabilities, colors and transforms. Through the novel disentanglement of 3DGS, we represent the discrete and unstructured 3DGS with continuous Gaussian Splatting functions, where we then train a latent diffusion model with the target of generating these Gaussian Splatting functions both unconditionally and conditionally. Meanwhile, we introduce a discretization algorithm to extract Gaussians at arbitrary numbers from the generated functions via octree-guided sampling and optimization. We explore DiffGS for various tasks, including unconditional generation, conditional generation from text, image, and partial 3DGS, as well as Point-to-Gaussian generation. We believe that DiffGS provides a new direction for flexibly modeling and generating Gaussian Splatting.

Inferring Neural Signed Distance Functions by Overfitting on Single Noisy Point Clouds through Finetuning Data-Driven based Priors

It is important to estimate an accurate signed distance function (SDF) from a point cloud in many computer vision applications. The latest methods learn neural SDFs using either a data-driven based or an overfitting-based strategy. However, these two kinds of methods are with either poor generalization or slow convergence, which limits their capability under challenging scenarios like highly noisy point clouds. To resolve this issue, we propose a method to promote pros of both data-driven based and overfitting-based methods for better generalization, faster inference, and higher accuracy in learning neural SDFs. We introduce a novel statistical reasoning algorithm in local regions which is able to finetune data-driven based priors without signed distance supervision, clean point cloud, or point normals. This helps our method start with a good initialization, and converge to a minimum in a much faster way. Our numerical and visual comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods show our superiority over these methods in surface reconstruction and point cloud denoising on widely used shape and scene benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchao15/LocalN2NM.

Zero-shot Object Navigation with Vision-Language Models Reasoning

Object navigation is crucial for robots, but traditional methods require substantial training data and cannot be generalized to unknown environments. Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) aims to address this challenge, allowing robots to interact with unknown objects without specific training data. Language-driven zero-shot object navigation (L-ZSON) is an extension of ZSON that incorporates natural language instructions to guide robot navigation and interaction with objects. In this paper, we propose a novel Vision Language model with a Tree-of-thought Network (VLTNet) for L-ZSON. VLTNet comprises four main modules: vision language model understanding, semantic mapping, tree-of-thought reasoning and exploration, and goal identification. Among these modules, Tree-of-Thought (ToT) reasoning and exploration module serves as a core component, innovatively using the ToT reasoning framework for navigation frontier selection during robot exploration. Compared to conventional frontier selection without reasoning, navigation using ToT reasoning involves multi-path reasoning processes and backtracking when necessary, enabling globally informed decision-making with higher accuracy. Experimental results on PASTURE and RoboTHOR benchmarks demonstrate the outstanding performance of our model in LZSON, particularly in scenarios involving complex natural language as target instructions.