Technology Category
Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan RepairComputer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based VisionSearch and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Search
AstroSplat: Physics-Based Gaussian Splatting for Rendering and Reconstruction of Small Celestial Bodies
🤖 AI Summary
Existing methods for small-body surface reconstruction lack explicit modeling of the interaction between material properties and illumination, limiting their suitability for high-precision mission planning and scientific analysis. This work proposes AstroSplat, a novel framework that integrates a physics-driven planetary bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) model into Gaussian splatting representation. By doing so, it overcomes the limitations of conventional spherical harmonics in appearance modeling and enables joint reconstruction of geometric structure and photometric characteristics. Experiments on real imagery from NASA’s Dawn mission demonstrate that the proposed method substantially outperforms existing spherical harmonics-based approaches, achieving significant improvements in both rendering fidelity and 3D reconstruction accuracy.
Technology Category
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Image-based surface reconstruction and characterization are crucial for missions to small celestial bodies (e.g., asteroids), as it informs mission planning, navigation, and scientific analysis. Recent advances in Gaussian splatting enable high-fidelity neural scene representations but typically rely on a spherical harmonic intensity parameterization that is strictly appearance-based and does not explicitly model material properties or light-surface interactions. We introduce AstroSplat, a physics-based Gaussian splatting framework that integrates planetary reflectance models to improve the autonomous reconstruction and photometric characterization of small-body surfaces from in-situ imagery. The proposed framework is validated on real imagery taken by NASA's Dawn mission, where we demonstrate superior rendering performance and surface reconstruction accuracy compared to the typical spherical harmonic parameterization.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
surface reconstruction
small celestial bodies
photometric characterization
light-surface interaction
material properties
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
physics-based rendering
Gaussian splatting
planetary reflectance models
small celestial bodies
surface reconstruction
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