# ProbeSDF: Light Field Probes for Neural Surface Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10084 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10084/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [BlendedMVS: A Large-scale Dataset for Generalized Multi-view Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10127/) (2019)
- [Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03092/) (2023)
- [Extracting Triangular 3D Models, Materials, and Lighting From Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12503/) (2021)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [NeuS2: Fast Learning of Neural Implicit Surfaces for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05231/) (2022)
- [PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06521/) (2024)
- [GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/) (2023)
- [TensoIR: Tensorial Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12461/) (2023)
- [HumanRF: High-Fidelity Neural Radiance Fields for Humans in Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06356/) (2023)
- [NeRFReN: Neural Radiance Fields with Reflections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15234/) (2021)
- [Voxurf: Voxel-based Efficient and Accurate Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12697/) (2022)
- [NeRF-Casting: Improved View-Dependent Appearance with Consistent Reflections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14871/) (2024)
- [Neural Directional Encoding for Efficient and Accurate View-Dependent Appearance Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14847/) (2024)
- [Objects as volumes: A stochastic geometry view of opaque solids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15406/) (2023)
- [3D Reconstruction with Fast Dipole Sums](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16788/) (2024)
- [Sur2f: A Hybrid Representation for High-Quality and Efficient Surface Reconstruction from Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03704/) (2024)
- [Scaling Probe-Based Real-Time Dynamic Global Illumination for Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10796/) (2020)

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

- [OLATverse: A Large-scale Real-world Object Dataset with Precise Lighting Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02483/) (2025)
- [DySurface: Consistent 4D Surface Reconstruction via Bridging Explicit Gaussians and Implicit Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10360/) (2026)
- [A Mixed-Primitive-based Gaussian Splatting Method for Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11321/) (2025)
- [GRMM: Real-Time High-Fidelity Gaussian Morphable Head Model with Learned Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02141/) (2025)
- [Effective Gaussian Management for High-fidelity Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12742/) (2025)
- [PAGaS: Pixel-Aligned 1DoF Gaussian Splatting for Depth Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22129/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

SDF-based differential rendering frameworks have achieved state-of-the-art multiview 3D shape reconstruction. In this work, we re-examine this family of approaches by minimally reformulating its core appearance model in a way that simultaneously yields faster computation and increased performance. To this goal, we exhibit a physically-inspired minimal radiance parametrization decoupling angular and spatial contributions, by encoding them with a small number of features stored in two respective volumetric grids of different resolutions. Requiring as little as four parameters per voxel, and a tiny MLP call inside a single fully fused kernel, our approach allows to enhance performance with both surface and image (PSNR) metrics, while providing a significant training speedup and real-time rendering. We show this performance to be consistently achieved on real data over two widely different and popular application fields, generic object and human subject shape reconstruction, using four representative and challenging datasets.