DentalSplat: Dental Occlusion Novel View Synthesis from Sparse Intra-Oral Photographs
This work addresses the need for improved 3D reconstruction in telemedicine orthodontics, enabling better clinical decision-making from sparse imagery, but it is incremental as it builds on existing 3D Gaussian Splatting methods with specific adaptations.
The paper tackled the problem of synthesizing novel views of dental occlusion from sparse intra-oral photographs, which is challenging due to limited input views and lack of camera pose information, and achieved superior novel view synthesis quality by outperforming state-of-the-art techniques on a dataset of 950 clinical cases and 195 video-based test cases.
In orthodontic treatment, particularly within telemedicine contexts, observing patients' dental occlusion from multiple viewpoints facilitates timely clinical decision-making. Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have shown strong potential in 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, conventional 3DGS pipelines typically rely on densely captured multi-view inputs and precisely initialized camera poses, limiting their practicality. Orthodontic cases, in contrast, often comprise only three sparse images, specifically, the anterior view and bilateral buccal views, rendering the reconstruction task especially challenging. The extreme sparsity of input views severely degrades reconstruction quality, while the absence of camera pose information further complicates the process. To overcome these limitations, we propose DentalSplat, an effective framework for 3D reconstruction from sparse orthodontic imagery. Our method leverages a prior-guided dense stereo reconstruction model to initialize the point cloud, followed by a scale-adaptive pruning strategy to improve the training efficiency and reconstruction quality of 3DGS. In scenarios with extremely sparse viewpoints, we further incorporate optical flow as a geometric constraint, coupled with gradient regularization, to enhance rendering fidelity. We validate our approach on a large-scale dataset comprising 950 clinical cases and an additional video-based test set of 195 cases designed to simulate real-world remote orthodontic imaging conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively handles sparse input scenarios and achieves superior novel view synthesis quality for dental occlusion visualization, outperforming state-of-the-art techniques.