2D-SuGaR: Surface-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Mesh Reconstruction

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful technique for generating photorealistic renderings of a scene in real-time. However, the volumetric nature of 3DGS limits its ability to accurately capture surface geometry. To address this, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) was proposed to enable view-consistent and geometrically accurate surface reconstruction from multi-view images. However, 2DGS can be sensitive to the initialization of the Gaussian primitives. Reliance on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) initializations, which can produce poor estimates on challenging image sets, may lead to subpar results. In this work, we enhance 2DGS by incorporating monocular depth and normal priors to improve both geometric accuracy and robustness. We propose a depth-guided initialization strategy for Gaussians and introduce a clustering-based technique for pruning degenerate Gaussians. We evaluate our method on the DTU dataset, where it achieves state-of-the-art results in mesh reconstruction while preserving high-quality novel view synthesis.