English

SiPhy: Single-Image Physical Property Reasoning

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-07-24 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Inferring physical properties such as mass, stiffness, and elasticity from a single image is essential for simulation and embodied AI, yet most existing approaches rely on multi-view reconstruction or physics-based supervision. We introduce SiPhy, a unified framework for single-image physical property reasoning that aligns 3D-aware visual cues, depth with language-based material knowledge. From one RGB image, SiPhy samples pseudo-voxel points, extracts CLIP features, and grounds them to material candidates proposed by a VLM. A part-based contrastive aggregator enforces region consistency, while a heaviness-aware refinement improves thickness and volume estimation for dense objects. Across ABO-500, MVImgNet-100, and PhysXNet-100, SiPhy achieves state-of-the-art single-image performance, surpassing multi-view reconstruction methods by improving mass MnRE by up to 93% (vs. PUGS), reducing density MAE by 35.5% (vs. NeRF2Physics), and lowering Young's modulus error by 23.5%. We further validate SiPhy on real hand-object interaction datasets, demonstrating its potential as a data annotation engine for physical understanding from single-view imagery.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.22355,
  title  = {SiPhy: Single-Image Physical Property Reasoning},
  author = {Hoang Le and Joonwoo Kwon and Elkhan Ismayilzada and Yufei Zhang and Zijun Cui},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.22355},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ECCV 2026 (main track)