Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds via Image-free Point-to-Gaussian Inference

The task of surface reconstruction from point clouds is to produce high-quality meshes using sampled 3D points (no images available). Traditional methods primarily focus on geometric accuracy but often produce meshes without texture colors. In this paper, we present a brand-new perspective in point cloud reconstruction task-Imagining points as more informative Gaussian splats and obtaining colored surfaces through free-form Gaussian-rendering reconstruction. We train a universal Point-to-Gaussian model to infer the attributes of Gaussian splats for any given pointcloud with merely point coordinates (and color optionally) as input, without requiring any image. Significant technical designs are applied on initialization, regularization and loss functions, making the whole learning process stable. The inferred Gaussian splats can faithfully recover the original appearance of objects or scenes (capable of quick rendering from any viewpoint, like human's imagination ability), meanwhile closely adhering to the input shape. After obtaining a sufficient number of virtually rendered images and depth maps, we employ the truncated signed distance function (TSDF) fusion to get the reconstruction results, producing high-quality and colored meshes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods in surface reconstruction metrics while maintaining high efficiency and simplicity.