  In this paper, we present a learning based approach to depth fusion, i.e.,
dense 3D reconstruction from multiple depth images. The most common approach to
depth fusion is based on averaging truncated signed distance functions, which
was originally proposed by Curless and Levoy in 1996. While this method is
simple and provides great results, it is not able to reconstruct (partially)
occluded surfaces and requires a large number frames to filter out sensor noise
and outliers. Motivated by the availability of large 3D model repositories and
recent advances in deep learning, we present a novel 3D CNN architecture that
learns to predict an implicit surface representation from the input depth maps.
Our learning based method significantly outperforms the traditional volumetric
fusion approach in terms of noise reduction and outlier suppression. By
learning the structure of real world 3D objects and scenes, our approach is
further able to reconstruct occluded regions and to fill in gaps in the
reconstruction. We demonstrate that our learning based approach outperforms
both vanilla TSDF fusion as well as TV-L1 fusion on the task of volumetric
fusion. Further, we demonstrate state-of-the-art 3D shape completion results.
