PlanarSplatting: Accurate Planar Surface Reconstruction in 3 Minutes

This paper presents PlanarSplatting, an ultra-fast and accurate surface reconstruction approach for multi-view indoor images. We take the 3D planes as the main objective due to their compactness and structural expressiveness in indoor scenes, and develop an explicit optimization framework that learns to fit the expected surface of indoor scenes by splatting the 3D planes into 2.5D depth and normal maps. As our PlanarSplatting operates directly on the 3D plane primitives, it eliminates the dependencies on 2D/3D plane detection and plane matching/tracking for planar surface reconstruction. Furthermore, with the essential merits of plane-based representation coupled with CUDA-based implementation of planar splatting functions, Planar-Splatting reconstructs an indoor scene in 3 minutes while having significantly better geometric accuracy. Thanks to our ultra-fast reconstruction speed, the largest quantitative evaluation on the ScanNet and ScanNet++ datasets over hundreds of scenes clearly demonstrated the advantages of our method. We believe that our accurate and ultrafast planar surface reconstruction method will be applied in the structured data curation for surface reconstruction in the future. The code of our CUDA implementation will be publicly available.