# SAOR: Single-View Articulated Object Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13514 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13514/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Zero-1-to-3: Zero-shot One Image to 3D Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11328/) (2023)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [Putting NeRF on a Diet: Semantically Consistent Few-Shot View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00677/) (2021)
- [Deep Marching Tetrahedra: a Hybrid Representation for High-Resolution 3D Shape Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04276/) (2021)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [Neural 3D Mesh Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07566/) (2017)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [Learning Category-Specific Mesh Reconstruction from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07549/) (2018)
- [3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D shape and pose of animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07700/) (2016)
- [Escaping Plato's Cave: 3D Shape From Adversarial Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11606/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Single-view 3D Reconstruction via Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06473/) (2020)
- [Deep Convolutional Inverse Graphics Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03167/) (2015)
- [LASR: Learning Articulated Shape Reconstruction from a Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02976/) (2021)
- [MagicPony: Learning Articulated 3D Animals in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12497/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Learning the 3D Fauna of the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02400/) (2024)
- [Improving Semantic Correspondence with Viewpoint-Guided Spherical Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13216/) (2023)
- [Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15064/) (2024)
- [Survey on Modeling of Human-made Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14937/) (2024)
- [Jamais Vu: Exposing the Generalization Gap in Supervised Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08220/) (2025)
- [4D-Animal: Freely Reconstructing Animatable 3D Animals from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10437/) (2025)
- [DogMo: A Large-Scale Multi-View RGB-D Dataset for 4D Canine Motion Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24117/) (2025)
- [Enhancing 2D Representation Learning with a 3D Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02535/) (2024)
- [Advances and Trends in the 3D Reconstruction of the Shape and Motion of Animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16062/) (2025)
- [SAM 3D Animal: Promptable Animal 3D Reconstruction from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07604/) (2026)
- [PrITTI: Primitive-based Generation of Controllable and Editable 3D Semantic Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19117/) (2025)
- [MorphGS: Morphology-Adaptive Articulated 3D Motion Transfer from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02716/) (2026)
- [Adaptive Volumetric Mechanical Property Fields Invariant to Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18231/) (2026)
- [Progressive Pose-Guided 4D Animal Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00157/) (2026)
- [BAT3R: Bootstrapping Articulated 3D Reconstruction from 2D Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03891/) (2026)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Semantically Consistent Visual Features via a Simple 3D Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16988/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce SAOR, a novel approach for estimating the 3D shape, texture, and viewpoint of an articulated object from a single image captured in the wild. Unlike prior approaches that rely on pre-defined category-specific 3D templates or tailored 3D skeletons, SAOR learns to articulate shapes from single-view image collections with a skeleton-free part-based model without requiring any 3D object shape priors. To prevent ill-posed solutions, we propose a cross-instance consistency loss that exploits disentangled object shape deformation and articulation. This is helped by a new silhouette-based sampling mechanism to enhance viewpoint diversity during training. Our method only requires estimated object silhouettes and relative depth maps from off-the-shelf pre-trained networks during training. At inference time, given a single-view image, it efficiently outputs an explicit mesh representation. We obtain improved qualitative and quantitative results on challenging quadruped animals compared to relevant existing work.