Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference

This presentation will cover emergent AI-assisted, 3D visualization and surface reconstruction pipelines and contextualize these tools alongside the older methods of structure-from-motion (sometimes called photogrammetry). A brief overview of this field and an example pipeline for implementation will be demonstrated. Initial results from Neural Radiance Field and Gaussian Splatting algorithms with surface reconstruction capabilities will be compared, and these algorithms will be assessed for their fitness for morphometric analyses and other uses. Some of the key differences between these methods and "work-horse" structure-from-motion methods will be highlighted, with recognition of cases where these cutting-edge methods succeed where structure-from-motion previously failed.