Title: ViscoReg: Neural Signed Distance Functions via Viscosity Solutions
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: surface reconstruction, implicit neural representations, eikonal equation, error estimates

Abstract: Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) that learn Signed Distance Functions (SDFs) from point cloud data represent the state-of-the-art for geometrically accurate 3D scene reconstruction. However, training these Neural SDFs often requires enforcing the Eikonal equation, an ill-posed equation that also leads to unstable gradient flows. Numerical Eikonal solvers have relied on viscosity approaches for regularization and stability. Motivated by this well-established theory, we introduce ViscoReg, a novel regularizer that provably stabilizes Neural SDF training. Empirically, ViscoReg outperforms state-of-the-art approaches such as SIREN, DiGS, and StEik on ShapeNet, the Surface Reconstruction Benchmark, and 3D scene reconstruction datasets. Additionally, we establish novel generalization error estimates for Neural SDFs in terms of the training error, using the theory of viscosity solutions.