We introduce SparseNeuS, a novel neural rendering based method for the task
of surface reconstruction from multi-view images. This task becomes more
difficult when only sparse images are provided as input, a scenario where
existing neural reconstruction approaches usually produce incomplete or
distorted results. Moreover, their inability of generalizing to unseen new
scenes impedes their application in practice. Contrarily, SparseNeuS can
generalize to new scenes and work well with sparse images (as few as 2 or 3).
SparseNeuS adopts signed distance function (SDF) as the surface representation,
and learns generalizable priors from image features by introducing geometry
encoding volumes for generic surface prediction. Moreover, several strategies
are introduced to effectively leverage sparse views for high-quality
reconstruction, including 1) a multi-level geometry reasoning framework to
recover the surfaces in a coarse-to-fine manner; 2) a multi-scale color
blending scheme for more reliable color prediction; 3) a consistency-aware
fine-tuning scheme to control the inconsistent regions caused by occlusion and
noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms
the state-of-the-art methods, but also exhibits good efficiency,
generalizability, and flexibility.Comment: Project page: https://www.xxlong.site/SparseNeuS