🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the significant challenge of reconstructing watertight, 3D-printable models from rover imagery in Martian terrain, which is characterized by low texture, irregular geometry, and incomplete observations. The authors propose and systematically evaluate the first end-to-end pipeline tailored for Mars scenes, integrating RAFT-Stereo and SGBM for stereo matching, followed by geometric completion using Alpha Shapes, Poisson surface reconstruction, and deterministic diffusion-based hole filling to produce watertight meshes. Experimental results reveal that RAFT-Stereo—despite its strong performance on terrestrial datasets—exhibits inferior edge alignment on Martian images, and that the effectiveness of geometric completion methods varies substantially, underscoring the necessity of domain-specific validation for Mars missions. This work establishes the first benchmark demonstrating the limitations of general-purpose 3D reconstruction techniques in extraterrestrial environments and provides critical guidance for manufacturable modeling in planetary exploration.
📝 Abstract
Reconstructing printable 3D models from Mars rover imagery is challenging because Martian terrain is low-texture, irregular, and partially observed. We evaluate a pipeline that estimates stereo depth from NASA Curiosity images, completes geometry, and exports watertight OBJ meshes. On Middlebury, RAFT-Stereo outperforms semi-global block matching (SGBM), reducing disparity MAE from 3.22px to 0.73px and increasing valid prediction coverage from 76.3% to 100.0%. On Curiosity imagery, however, RAFT's denser disparities show weaker edge alignment and higher photometric reprojection error, suggesting that benchmark accuracy does not directly transfer to Martian terrain reconstruction. Geometry completion demonstrates a tradeoff between local fidelity and global connectivity. We find that alpha shapes preserve accurate but fragmented structure, Poisson reconstruction produces more coherent meshes but adds unsupported surfaces, and a deterministic diffusion-fill baseline is intermediate but sensitive to stereo quality. Overall, standard stereo and completion methods can produce printable approximations of Martian terrain, but reliable reconstruction requires stronger domain-specific validation.