# Transientangelo: Few-Viewpoint Surface Reconstruction Using Single-Photon Lidar

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.12191 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12191/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03092/) (2023)
- [CAT3D: Create Anything in 3D with Multi-View Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10314/) (2024)
- [SAL: Sign Agnostic Learning of Shapes from Raw Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10414/) (2019)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [ReconFusion: 3D Reconstruction with Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02981/) (2023)
- [NeuS2: Fast Learning of Neural Implicit Surfaces for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05231/) (2022)
- [FreeNeRF: Improving Few-shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07418/) (2023)
- [Dense Depth Priors for Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse Input Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03288/) (2021)
- [Urban Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14643/) (2021)
- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [InfoNeRF: Ray Entropy Minimization for Few-Shot Neural Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15399/) (2021)
- [SinNeRF: Training Neural Radiance Fields on Complex Scenes from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00928/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Blurred LiDAR for Sharper 3D: Robust Handheld 3D Scanning with Diffuse LiDAR and RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19474/) (2024)
- [Recovering Parametric Scenes from Very Few Time-of-Flight Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16132/) (2025)
- [Neural Inverse Rendering from Propagating Light](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05347/) (2025)
- [SH-SAS: An Implicit Neural Representation for Complex Spherical-Harmonic Scattering Fields for 3D Synthetic Aperture Sonar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11087/) (2025)
- [SP-TransientBench: A Real-Captured Single Photon Perception Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18952/) (2026)
- [Resolving Mixed Single-Photon LiDAR Returns for Foreground-View and Hidden Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01206/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of few-viewpoint 3D surface reconstruction using raw measurements from a lidar system. Lidar captures 3D scene geometry by emitting pulses of light to a target and recording the speed-of-light time delay of the reflected light. However, conventional lidar systems do not output the raw, captured waveforms of backscattered light; instead, they pre-process these data into a 3D point cloud. Since this procedure typically does not accurately model the noise statistics of the system, exploit spatial priors, or incorporate information about downstream tasks, it ultimately discards useful information that is encoded in raw measurements of backscattered light. Here, we propose to leverage raw measurements captured with a single-photon lidar system from multiple viewpoints to optimize a neural surface representation of a scene. The measurements consist of time-resolved photon count histograms, or transients, which capture information about backscattered light at picosecond time scales. Additionally, we develop new regularization strategies that improve robustness to photon noise, enabling accurate surface reconstruction with as few as 10 photons per pixel. Our method outperforms other techniques for few-viewpoint 3D reconstruction based on depth maps, point clouds, or conventional lidar as demonstrated in simulation and with captured data.