The paper proposes a method to adapt the Depth Anything V2 (DAV2) zero‑shot relative depth model for estimating lunar surface height. By fine‑tuning DAV2 with publicly available stereophotogrammetry‑derived DEM data, the authors achieve a significant performance boost over the unadapted zero‑shot model. This improved estimator can provide more accurate relative height information useful for hazard detection in future ESA lunar landings.
By Patrick Bauer, Marius Schwinning, Melanie Siegel, Andreas Weinmann, Hichem Snoussi
Visual localization becomes extremely challenging in planetary-like terrains characterized by low texture, perceptual aliasing, harsh illumination, and sparse, weakly overlapping viewpoints induced by forward rover motion and unconstrained driving directions. Under these conditions, state-of-the-art image-to-image and image-to-map matching pipelines suffer significant performance degradation.
arXiv:2606.27223v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Gaussian Splatting has been recently explored for satellite 3D reconstruction, demonstrating flexibility and efficiency in representing radiometric...
By Jiyong Kim, Shuang Song, Rongjun Qin
Precise rover localization is a prerequisite for autonomous lunar exploration, yet the absence of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals and the cumulative drift of local localization methods severely constrain long-range missions. Cross-view localization provides a promising drift-free global solution by matching rover-view and satellite-view imagery.
Gaussian Splatting has been recently explored for satellite 3D reconstruction, demonstrating flexibility and efficiency in representing radiometrically diverse satellite scenes. However, the limited top viewpoint of satellite imagery results in insufficient supervision on building facades, leaving surface holes and degraded visual fidelity.
arXiv:2604. 05182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the Large Sparse Reconstruction Model to study how scaling transformer context windows affects feed-forward 3D reconstruction.
By Zhengqin Li, Cheng Zhang, Jakob Engel, Zhao Dong
The study evaluates eleven feature detector–matcher combinations for lunar visual SLAM using synthetic, lunar-testbed, and terrestrial-analogue datasets. SuperPoint pairings outperform SIFT with ratio-tested FLANN in a rotation-only metric on lunar testbeds, but SIFT excels when rotation and translation are jointly scored on synthetic data. In stereo VO, SuperPoint maintains tracking across all datasets, while classical detectors are more sensitive to lighting conditions, and the fastest learned combination is SuperPoint with LightGlue.
By Guillem Casadesus Vila, Grace Gao
arXiv:2605.26616v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: While 3D Gaussian Splatting has achieved remarkable success in photorealistic novel view synthesis, its pursuit of fast and high-fidelity 3D recons...
By Zhenhua Du, Zhen Tan, Haoyu Zhang, Dewen Hu, Shuaifeng Zhi, Peidong Liu
arXiv:2508.03077v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) overcomes the limitations of optimization-based 3DGS by enabling fast and high-quality reconstruction with...
By Anran Wu, Long Peng, Xin Di, Xueyuan Dai, Chen Wu, Yang Wang, Xueyang Fu, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha
Large 3D foundation models such as MASt3R achieve state-of-the-art stereo reconstruction but are computationally demanding for deployment under strict hardware constraints -- a critical limitation in domains such as planetary exploration, where onboard computing is severely restricted. We study how far such models can be compressed through knowledge distillation, using lunar stereo reconstruction as a challenging and practically relevant case study.
The paper introduces a multimodal foundation model for lunar remote sensing, trained from scratch on SomBench—a dataset of nearly two million co‑registered tile bundles across 11 modalities at 1 m and 100 m resolutions. The model extends the TerraMind masked‑token architecture with lunar‑specific features such as explicit acquisition geometry and joint training of two spatial scales, and employs FlexiViT patch embeddings for adaptable patch sizes. Evaluation on crater detection, irregular mare patch segmentation, and polar ice prospectivity regression shows that the pretrained model matches or surpasses ImageNet‑pretrained baselines, with notable label efficiency and effective adaptation via LoRA.
By Paolo Fraccaro, Gabby Nyirjesy, Daniela Szwarcman, Himanshu Patil, Vishal Gaur, Rohit Lal, Rachel A. Slank, Geoffrey Dawson, Hiyam Debary, Michael K. Barker, Andrew Annex, Vishnu Viswanathan, Zachary Morse, Ethan I. Schaefer, Nikolaos Dionelis, Ankur Kumar, Campbell D. Watson, Manil Maskey, Rebekah I. Dawson-Rigas, Juan Bernab\'e-Moreno, Rahul Ramachandran, Sujit Roy
arXiv:2601.15951v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Novel view synthesis (NVS) of static and dynamic urban scenes is essential for autonomous driving simulation, yet existing methods often struggle t...
By Sheng Miao, Sijin Li, Pan Wang, Dongfeng Bai, Bingbing Liu, Yue Wang, Andreas Geiger, Yiyi Liao