GVKF: Gaussian Voxel Kernel Functions for Highly Efficient Surface Reconstruction in Open Scenes

In this paper we present a novel method for efficient and effective 3D surface reconstruction in open scenes. Existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based works typically require extensive training and rendering time due to the adopted implicit representations. In contrast, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) uses an explicit and discrete representation, hence the reconstructed surface is built by the huge number of Gaussian primitives, which leads to excessive memory consumption and rough surface details in sparse Gaussian areas. To address these issues, we propose Gaussian Voxel Kernel Functions (GVKF), which establish a continuous scene representation based on discrete 3DGS through kernel regression. The GVKF integrates fast 3DGS rasterization and highly effective scene implicit representations, achieving high-fidelity open scene surface reconstruction. Experiments on challenging scene datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed GVKF, featuring with high reconstruction quality, real-time rendering speed, significant savings in storage and training memory consumption.

OPE-SR: Orthogonal Position Encoding for Designing a Parameter-free Upsampling Module in Arbitrary-scale Image Super-Resolution

Implicit neural representation (INR) is a popular approach for arbitrary-scale image super-resolution (SR), as a key component of INR, position encoding improves its representation ability. Motivated by position encoding, we propose orthogonal position encoding (OPE) - an extension of position encoding - and an OPE-Upscale module to replace the INR-based upsampling module for arbitrary-scale image super-resolution. Same as INR, our OPE-Upscale Module takes 2D coordinates and latent code as inputs; however it does not require training parameters. This parameter-free feature allows the OPE-Upscale Module to directly perform linear combination operations to reconstruct an image in a continuous manner, achieving an arbitrary-scale image reconstruction. As a concise SR framework, our method has high computing efficiency and consumes less memory comparing to the state-of-the-art (SOTA), which has been confirmed by extensive experiments and evaluations. In addition, our method has comparable results with SOTA in arbitrary scale image super-resolution. Last but not the least, we show that OPE corresponds to a set of orthogonal basis, justifying our design principle.