Abstract
We propose to use the family of Mat\'ern kernels for implicit surface reconstruction, building upon the recent success of kernel methods for 3D reconstruction of oriented point clouds. As we show from a theoretical and practical perspective, Mat\'ern kernels have some appealing properties which make them particularly well suited for surface reconstruction -- outperforming state-of-the-art methods based on the arc-cosine kernel while being significantly easier to implement, faster to compute, and scalable. Being stationary, we demonstrate that Mat\'ern kernels allow for tunable surface reconstruction in the same way as Fourier feature mappings help coordinate-based MLPs overcome spectral bias. Moreover, we theoretically analyze Mat\'ern kernels' connection to SIREN networks as well as their relation to previously employed arc-cosine kernels. Finally, based on recently introduced Neural Kernel Fields, we present data-dependent Mat\'ern kernels and conclude that especially the Laplace kernel (being part of the Mat\'ern family) is extremely competitive, performing almost on par with state-of-the-art methods in the noise-free case while having a more than five times shorter training time.