English

Reconstruction of a 3D wireframe from a single line drawing via generative depth estimation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-06 v2

Abstract

The conversion of 2D freehand sketches into 3D models remains a pivotal challenge in computer vision, bridging the gap between fluent sketching and CAD. Traditional monocular depth reconstruction techniques are not suitable for line drawing interpretation. We propose a generative approach by framing reconstruction as a conditional dense depth estimation task. To achieve this, we implemented a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with a conditioning framework to resolve the inherent ambiguities of orthographic projections. We trained our model using a dataset of over one million image-depth pairs. Our framework demonstrated robust performance across varying shape complexities, with 5.3 percent average depth error.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.13549,
  title  = {Reconstruction of a 3D wireframe from a single line drawing via generative depth estimation},
  author = {Elton Cao and Hod Lipson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.13549},
  year   = {2026}
}