Learning Spherical Occupancy Profiles for Multi-View 3D Reconstruction and Generation

We study spherical occupancy profiles-the ray-wise occupancy probability profiles P(r) = T(r) o(r) distilled from multi-view 3D Gaussian reconstructions-as a unified intermediate representation for both discriminative and generative 3D reconstruction from images. On a 999-object subset of Google Scanned Objects with 48 turntable views each, we train (i) a discriminative per-ray decoder that injects global view-averaged and ray-specific image evidence into a FiLM-conditioned profile head, reaching median soft depth error 0.035 (normalized) on an independent 90-object test split, and (ii) a generative pipeline built on a profile VAE and a latent diffusion model, which supports unconditional sampling that matches the reconstruction manifold and image-conditioned multi-solution reconstruction whose per-object solution spread is quantifiable and tunable via classifier-free guidance. We further analyze the morphology of predicted profiles: post-hoc power sharpening and a learned sharpening target both recover ground-truth profile width without degrading depth, exposing a monotonic width-peak frontier in the L1-per-ray loss family and motivating a principled redefinition of morphology gates. Real-photo validation on two DTU scenes confirms the pipeline transfers to non-synthetic input. Our results suggest that ray-wise occupancy profiles offer a compact, learned, and uncertainty-aware interface between multi-view reconstruction and generative priors.