GECO : Fast Generative Image-to-3D Within One SECOnd

Recent advancements in single-image 3D generation have produced two main categories of methods: reconstruction-based and generative methods. Reconstruction-based methods are efficient but lack uncertainty handling, leading to blurry artifacts in unseen regions. Generative approaches that based on score distillation (Poole et al. 2023), (Wang et al. 2024) are slow due to scene-specific optimization. Other methods, like InstantMesh (Xu et al. 2024), use a two-stage process - generating multi-view images with a diffusion model and then reconstructing 3D - which is inefficient due to multiple denoising steps of the diffusion model. To overcome these limitations, we introduce GECO, a feed-forward method for fast and high-quality single-image-to-3D generation within one second on a single GPU. Our approach resolves uncertainty and inefficiency issues through a two-stage distillation process. In the first stage, we distill a multi-step diffusion model (Shi et al. 2023) into a one-step model using score distillation for single-image-to-multi-view synthesis. To mitigate the synthesis quality degradation caused by the one-step model, we introduce a second distillation stage to learn to predict high-quality 3D from imperfect multi-view generated images by performing distillation directly on 3D representations. Experiments demonstrate that GECO offers significant speed improvements and comparable reconstruction quality compared to prior two-stage methods.