Practical High-Fidelity Novel-View Synthesis of Mounted Lepidoptera

arXiv:2606.31679 · cs.GR, cs.CV · Submitted 2026-06-30 · Read on arXiv

cs.GR, cs.CV

Submitted: 2026-06-30

Updated: 2026-09-16

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Mounted butterflies are among the most striking objects in natural history collections.

Terminology

Abstract

Mounted butterflies are among the most striking objects in natural history collections. However, their beauty is notoriously hard to digitize in 3D: they are small and fragile, with microscopic hairs and vein structures. Capturing them in sufficient detail, therefore, requires a macro lens, which has a very limited Depth of Field (DoF). Moreover, a camera body cannot be maneuvered beneath a pinned specimen to photograph its ventral surface. We introduce an end-to-end pipeline that resolves these challenges, turning such specimens into photorealistic 3D models viewable from every direction. It combines three ingredients: handheld focus stacking for all-in-focus macro capture without a tripod, a non-contact first-surface mirror system that exposes the ventral surface without touching the specimen, and a segmentation-free, mirror-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting extension. We validate the reconstructions and design decisions on nine diverse specimens.

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