# ORCA: Occlusion-Aware Refinement and Completion for Novel View Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.17450 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17450/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [SyncDreamer: Generating Multiview-consistent Images from a Single-view Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03453/) (2023)
- [CAT3D: Create Anything in 3D with Multi-View Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10314/) (2024)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Stable Virtual Camera: Generative View Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14489/) (2025)
- [RealmDreamer: Text-Driven 3D Scene Generation with Inpainting and Depth Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07199/) (2024)
- [Long-Term Photometric Consistent Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10700/) (2023)
- [VistaDream: Sampling multiview consistent images for single-view scene reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16892/) (2024)
- [Baking Gaussian Splatting into Diffusion Denoiser for Fast and Scalable Single-stage Image-to-3D Generation and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14384/) (2024)
- [MVGenMaster: Scaling Multi-View Generation from Any Image via 3D Priors Enhanced Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16157/) (2024)
- [DepR: Depth Guided Single-view Scene Reconstruction with Instance-level Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22825/) (2025)
- [3D-Adapter: Geometry-Consistent Multi-View Diffusion for High-Quality 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18974/) (2024)
- [One2Scene: Geometric Consistent Explorable 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19766/) (2026)
- [Affine-Equivariant Kernel Space Encoding for NeRF Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02831/) (2025)
- [ExScene: Free-View 3D Scene Reconstruction with Gaussian Splatting from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23881/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Novel-view synthesis from a single image is a fundamentally ambiguous problem. As the camera moves away from the input viewpoint, previously hidden regions become visible, exposing missing geometry and holes in the reconstructed scene. Existing methods often rely on generative models to complete such regions. However, many of these artifacts are small gaps near depth boundaries and do not require generating new scene content. In order to eliminate expensive process of generating image we introduce ORCA, an occlusion-aware method for reconstructing and completing explorable 3D scenes from a single image. ORCA first introduces 3D structure into a Gaussian-anchor representation using monocular depth while preserving the original camera-ray correspondence. During scene exploration, missing regions are handled based on their size and structure. Small disocclusions are repaired using RGB-D information already available in the reconstruction, while generative inpainting is reserved for larger regions that cannot be reliably recovered from the scene. New Gaussian anchors are added and optimized locally without modifying the existing representation. By reducing unnecessary reliance on generative inpainting, ORCA limits generation-induced hallucinations and better preserves the content and structure of the original scene. On DIV2K, ORCA improves novel-view quality over VistaDream across all reported metrics, increasing MUSIQ from 61.60 to 68.71 and CLIP-IQA from 0.474 to 0.574. These results show that many novel-view artifacts can be repaired effectively by reusing information already present in the reconstructed scene.