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Research on differentiable scene representations is consistently moving towards more efficient, real-time models. Recently, this has led to the popularization of splatting methods, which eschew the traditional ray-based rendering of radiance fields in favor of rasterization. This has yielded a significant improvement in rendering speeds due to the efficiency of rasterization algorithms and hardware, but has come at a cost: the approximations that make rasterization efficient also make implementation of light transport phenomena like reflection and refraction much more difficult. We propose a novel scene representation which avoids these approximations, but keeps the efficiency and reconstruction quality of splatting by leveraging a decades-old efficient volumetric mesh ray tracing algorithm which has been largely overlooked in recent computer vision research. The resulting model, which we name Radiant Foam, achieves rendering speed and quality comparable to Gaussian Splatting, without the constraints of rasterization. Unlike ray traced Gaussian models that use hardware ray tracing acceleration, our method requires no special hardware or APIs beyond the standard features of a programmable GPU.

Modern scene reconstruction methods, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting, deliver photo-realistic novel view synthesis at real-time speeds, yet their adoption in interactive graphics applications has been limited. A major bottleneck is the difficulty of interacting with these representations compared to traditional, human-authored 3D assets. While previous research has attempted to impose semantic decomposition on these models, significant challenges remain regarding segmentation quality and consistency. To address this, we introduce Semantic Foam, extending the recently proposed Radiant Foam representations to semantic decomposition tasks. Our approach integrates the natural spatial volumetric decomposition of Radiant Foam's Voronoi mesh with an explicit semantic feature field parameterized at the cell level. This explicit structure enables direct spatial regularization, which prevents artifacts caused by occlusion or inconsistent supervision across views - common pitfalls for other point-based representations. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable or superior object-level segmentation performance compared to state-of-the-art methods like Gaussian Grouping and SAGA.

Continuum robots are advancing bronchoscopy procedures by accessing complex lung airways and enabling targeted interventions. However, their development is limited by the lack of realistic training and test environments: Real data is difficult to collect due to ethical constraints and patient safety concerns, and developing autonomy algorithms requires realistic imaging and physical feedback. We present ROOM (Realistic Optical Observation in Medicine), a comprehensive simulation framework designed for generating photorealistic bronchoscopy training data. By leveraging patient CT scans, our pipeline renders multi-modal sensor data including RGB images with realistic noise and light specularities, metric depth maps, surface normals, optical flow and point clouds at medically relevant scales. We validate the data generated by ROOM in two canonical tasks for medical robotics: multi-view pose estimation and monocular depth estimation, demonstrating diverse challenges that state-of-the-art methods must overcome to transfer to these medical settings. Furthermore, we show that the data produced by ROOM can be used to fine-tune existing depth estimation models to overcome these challenges, also enabling other downstream applications such as navigation. We expect that ROOM will enable large-scale data generation across diverse patient anatomies and procedural scenarios that are challenging to capture in clinical settings. Code and data: https://github.com/iamsalvatore/room.

Radiance field methods (e.g. 3D Gaussian Splatting) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for novel view synthesis, yet their appearance modeling often relies on Spherical Harmonics (SH), which impose fundamental limitations. SH struggle with high-frequency signals, exhibit Gibbs ringing artifacts, and fail to capture specular reflections - a key component of realistic rendering. Although alternatives like spherical Gaussians offer improvements, they add significant optimization complexity. We propose Spherical Voronoi (SV) as a unified framework for appearance representation in 3D Gaussian Splatting. SV partitions the directional domain into learnable regions with smooth boundaries, providing an intuitive and stable parameterization for view-dependent effects. For diffuse appearance, SV achieves competitive results while keeping optimization simpler than existing alternatives. For reflections - where SH fail - we leverage SV as learnable reflection probes, taking reflected directions as input following principles from classical graphics. This formulation attains state-of-the-art results on synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that SV offers a principled, efficient, and general solution for appearance modeling in explicit 3D representations. Project page: https://sphericalvoronoi.github.io/

We introduce a differentiable 3D representation that unifies the ray tracing capabilities of foam-based ray tracing with the efficiency of modern rasterization pipelines. While prior foam representations enable constant-time ray traversal through an explicit volumetric partition of space, their potentially unbounded cells hinder efficient tile-based rasterization. We address this limitation by generalizing Voronoi foams to bounded power diagrams with controllable cell extents, enabling spatially bounded primitives without requiring expensive Delaunay triangulations during training. We further introduce an oriented surface formulation that explicitly models interfaces between interior and exterior regions, and decouple geometry from appearance by embedding differentiable texture directly on these surfaces. Together, these contributions yield a representation that preserves state-of-the-art ray tracing efficiency while achieving rasterization performance competitive with current generation 3DGS, providing a practical path toward unified real-time differentiable rendering.

We propose a novel Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) representation for non-opaque scenes that enables fast inference by utilizing textured polygons. Despite the high-quality novel view rendering that NeRF provides, a critical limitation is that it relies on volume rendering that can be computationally expensive and does not utilize the advancements in modern graphics hardware. Many existing methods fall short when it comes to modelling volumetric effects as they rely purely on surface rendering. We thus propose to model the scene with polygons, which can then be used to obtain the quadrature points required to model volumetric effects, and also their opacity and colour from the texture. To obtain such polygonal mesh, we train a specialized field whose zero-crossings would correspond to the quadrature points when volume rendering, and perform marching cubes on this field. We then perform ray-tracing and utilize the ray-tracing shader to obtain the final colour image. Our method allows an easy integration with existing graphics frameworks allowing rendering speed of over 100 frames-per-second for a \\(19201080\\) image, while still being able to represent non-opaque objects.

Radiance fields have emerged as powerful tools for 3D scene reconstruction. However, casual capture remains challenging due to the narrow field of view of perspective cameras, which limits viewpoint coverage and feature correspondences necessary for reliable camera calibration and reconstruction. While commercially available 360\\(^\\) cameras offer significantly broader coverage than perspective cameras for the same capture effort, existing 360\\(^\\) reconstruction methods require special capture protocols and pre-processing steps that undermine the promise of radiance fields: effortless workflows to capture and reconstruct 3D scenes. We propose a practical pipeline for reconstructing 3D scenes directly from raw 360\\(^\\) camera captures. We require no special capture protocols or pre-processing, and exhibit robustness to a prevalent source of reconstruction errors: the human operator that is visible in all 360\\(^\\) imagery. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce a multi-tiered dataset of scenes captured as raw dual-fisheye images, establishing a benchmark for robust casual 360\\(^\\) reconstruction. Our method significantly outperforms not only vanilla 3DGS for 360\\(^\\) cameras but also robust perspective baselines when perspective cameras are simulated from the same capture, demonstrating the advantages of 360\\(^\\) capture for casual reconstruction. Additional results are available at: https://theialab.github.io/fullcircle

3D Gaussian Splatting has recently been embraced as a versatile and effective method for scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis, owing to its high-quality results and compatibility with hardware rasterization. Despite its advantages, Gaussian Splatting's reliance on high-quality point cloud initialization by Structure-from-Motion (SFM) algorithms is a significant limitation to be overcome. To this end, we investigate various initialization strategies for Gaussian Splatting and delve into how volumetric reconstructions from Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) can be utilized to bypass the dependency on SFM data. Our findings demonstrate that random initialization can perform much better if carefully designed and that by employing a combination of improved initialization strategies and structure distillation from low-cost NeRF models, it is possible to achieve equivalent results, or at times even superior, to those obtained from SFM initialization.

Radiance field methods (e.g. 3D Gaussian Splatting) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for novel view synthesis, yet their appearance modeling often relies on Spherical Harmonics (SH), which impose fundamental limitations. SH struggle with high-frequency signals, exhibit Gibbs ringing artifacts, and fail to capture specular reflections - a key component of realistic rendering. Although alternatives like spherical Gaussians offer improvements, they add significant optimization complexity. We propose Spherical Voronoi (SV) as a unified framework for appearance representation in 3D Gaussian Splatting. SV partitions the directional domain into learnable regions with smooth boundaries, providing an intuitive and stable parameterization for view-dependent effects. For diffuse appearance, SV achieves competitive results while keeping optimization simpler than existing alternatives. For reflections - where SH fail - we leverage SV as learnable reflection probes, taking reflected directions as input following principles from classical graphics. This formulation attains state-of-the-art results on synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that SV offers a principled, efficient, and general solution for appearance modeling in explicit 3D representations.

Recent advances in radiance fields and novel view synthesis enable creation of realistic digital twins from photographs. However, current methods struggle with flat, texture-less surfaces, creating uneven and semi-transparent reconstructions, due to an ill-conditioned photometric reconstruction objective. Surface reconstruction methods solve this issue but sacrifice visual quality. We propose a novel hybrid 2D/3D representation that jointly optimizes constrained planar (2D) Gaussians for modeling flat surfaces and freeform (3D) Gaussians for the rest of the scene. Our end-to-end approach dynamically detects and refines planar regions, improving both visual fidelity and geometric accuracy. It achieves state-of-the-art depth estimation on ScanNet++ and ScanNetv2, and excels at mesh extraction without overfitting to a specific camera model, showing its effectiveness in producing high-quality reconstruction of indoor scenes.