From Transparent to Opaque: Rethinking Neural Implicit Surfaces with $α$-NeuS

Traditional 3D shape reconstruction techniques from multi-view images, such as structure from motion and multi-view stereo, primarily focus on opaque surfaces. Similarly, recent advances in neural radiance fields and its variants also primarily address opaque objects, encountering difficulties with the complex lighting effects caused by transparent materials. This paper introduces $\alpha$-NeuS, a new method for simultaneously reconstructing thin transparent objects and opaque objects based on neural implicit surfaces (NeuS). Our method leverages the observation that transparent surfaces induce local extreme values in the learned distance fields during neural volumetric rendering, contrasting with opaque surfaces that align with zero level sets. Traditional iso-surfacing algorithms such as marching cubes, which rely on fixed iso-values, are ill-suited for this data. We address this by taking the absolute value of the distance field and developing an optimization method that extracts level sets corresponding to both non-negative local minima and zero iso-values. We prove that the reconstructed surfaces are unbiased for both transparent and opaque objects. To validate our approach, we construct a benchmark that includes both real-world and synthetic scenes, demonstrating its practical utility and effectiveness. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/728388808/alpha-NeuS.