COREA: Coarse-to-Fine 3D Representation Alignment Between Relightable 3D Gaussians and SDF via Bidirectional 3D-to-3D Supervision
Authors: name: Jaeyoon Lee, name: Hojoon Jung, name: Sungtae Hwang, name: Jihyong Oh, name: Jongwon Choi
Organization: Chung-Ang University

We present COREA, the first unified framework that jointly learns relightable 3D Gaussians and a Signed Distance Field (SDF) for accurate geometry reconstruction and faithful relighting. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have extended toward mesh reconstruction and physically-based rendering (PBR), their geometry is still learned from 2D renderings, leading to coarse surfaces and unreliable BRDF-lighting decomposition. To address these limitations, COREA introduces a coarse-to-fine bidirectional 3D-to-3D alignment strategy that allows geometric signals to be learned directly in 3D space. Within this strategy, depth provides coarse alignment between the two representations, while depth gradients and normals refine fine-scale structure, and the resulting geometry supports stable BRDF-lighting decomposition. A density-control mechanism further stabilizes Gaussian growth, balancing geometric fidelity with memory efficiency. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that COREA achieves superior performance in novel-view synthesis, mesh reconstruction, and PBR within a unified framework.