Stable warm-up
Initialize Gaussian surfels and an explicit surface prior from sparse multi-view observations.
TopoSurfel: Closing the Loop between Gaussian Surfels and Meshes
TopoSurfel is a lightweight surface reconstruction framework in which discrete Gaussian surfels and a continuous proxy mesh co-evolve, producing cleaner and more complete geometry without additional learnable parameters.
University of Science and Technology of China
VIDEO
Project Video
Watch the full project video directly on this page.
CORE IDEA
Bring the mesh into the loop.
Instead of extracting a mesh only after training, TopoSurfel continuously uses a differentiable proxy mesh as structured geometry guidance.
Proxy mesh
Extract a continuous differentiable mesh directly from oriented surfels, without auxiliary networks.
Closed-loop evolution
Mesh-guided normals and density control suppress floaters, fill holes, and refine the next mesh.
METHOD
Surfel–mesh co-evolution
Warm up once, then iteratively exchange geometry between the two representations.
GEOMETRY RESULTS
Interactive DTU reconstruction
Drag to rotate · Scroll to zoom · Double-click to reset
All meshes use a neutral material and a shared display budget for a geometry-only comparison.
DTU scan
2DGS
GOF
MILo
TopoSurfel Ours
0.51DTU Chamfer Distance ↓
37 minDTU training time
0Extra learnable parameters
284 FPSReal-time rendering
CITATION
Cite TopoSurfel.
If you find this work useful, please use the following BibTeX entry.
BibTeX
@article{fan2026toposurfel,
title = {TopoSurfel: Closing the Loop between Gaussian
Surfels and Meshes for Surface Reconstruction},
author = {Fan, Chuanjin and Chang, Wenjie and Liao, Bohao
and Chen, Yujia and Yang, Wenfei and Zhang, Tianzhu},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.20687},
year = {2026},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20687}
}