Masked gaussian fields for automated building surface meshing from multi-view images

Over the last few decades, automated image-based building surface reconstruction has garnered substantial research interest and has been applied across various fields, such as heritage preservation, architectural planning, etc. Compared to the traditional photogrammetric and NeRF-based solutions, recently, Gaussian fields-based methods have exhibited significant potential in generating surface meshes due to their time-efficient training and detailed 3D information preservation. However, most gaussian fields-based methods are trained with all image pixels, encompassing building and nonbuilding areas, which results in significant noise for building meshes and a degeneration in time efficiency. This paper proposes a framework, Masked Gaussian Fields (MGFs), designed to generate accurate surface reconstruction for building in a time-efficient way. The framework first applies EfficientSAM and COLMAP to generate multi-level masks of the building and the corresponding masked point clouds. Subsequently, the masked gaussian fields are trained by integrating two innovative losses: a multi-level perceptual masked loss focused on constructing building regions and a boundary loss aimed at enhancing the details of the boundaries between different masks. Finally, this paper improves the tetrahedral surface mesh extraction method based on the masked gaussian spheres. Comprehensive experiments on UAV images demonstrate that, compared to the traditional method and several NeRF-based and Gaussian-based SOTA solutions, this approach significantly improves both the accuracy and efficiency of building surface reconstruction. Notably, as a byproduct, there is an additional gain in the novel view synthesis of the building.