Matérn Kernels for Tunable Implicit Surface Reconstruction

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission434 Authors

Keywords: surface reconstruction, kernel methods, neural tangent kernel

Abstract:

We propose to use the family of Matérn kernels for tunable implicit surface reconstruction, building upon the recent success of kernel methods for 3D reconstruction of oriented point clouds.
As we show, both, from a theoretical and practical perspective, Matérn kernels have some appealing properties which make them particularly well suited for surface reconstruction---outperforming state-of-the-art methods based on the arc-cosine kernel while being significantly easier to implement, faster to compute, and scaleable.
Being stationary, we demonstrate that the Matérn kernels' spectrum can be tuned in the same fashion as Fourier feature mappings help coordinate-based MLPs to overcome spectral bias.
Moreover, we theoretically analyze Matérn kernel's connection to SIREN networks as well as its relation to previously employed arc-cosine kernels.
Finally, based on recently introduced Neural Kernel Fields, we present data-dependent Matérn kernels and conclude that especially the Laplace kernel (being part of the Matérn family) is extremely competitive, performing almost on par with state-of-the-art methods in the noise-free case while having a more than five times shorter training time.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 434