TSPE-GS: Probabilistic Depth Extraction for Semi-Transparent Surface Reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

3D Gaussian Splatting-based geometry reconstruction is regarded as an excellent paradigm due to its favorable trade-off between speed and reconstruction quality. However, such 3D Gaussian-based reconstruction pipelines often face challenges when reconstructing semi-transparent surfaces, hindering their broader application in real-world scenes. The primary reason is the assumption in mainstream methods that each pixel corresponds to one specific depth—an assumption that fails under semi-transparent conditions where multiple surfaces are visible, leading to depth ambiguity and ineffective recovery of geometric structures. To address these challenges, we propose TSPE-GS (Transparent Surface Probabilistic Extraction for Gaussian Splatting), a novel probabilistic depth extraction approach that uniformly samples transmittance to model the multi-modal distribution of opacity and depth per pixel, replacing the previous single-peak distribution that caused depth confusion across surfaces. By progressively fusing truncated signed distance functions, TSPE-GS separately reconstructs distinct external and internal surfaces in a unified framework. Our method can be easily generalized to other Gaussian-based reconstruction pipelines, effectively extracting semi-transparent surfaces without requiring additional training overhead. Extensive experiments on both public and self-collected semi-transparent datasets, as well as opaque object datasets, demonstrate that TSPE-GS significantly enhances reconstruction accuracy for semi-transparent surfaces while maintaining reconstruction quality in opaque scenes.