[2510.14765] Inpainting the Red Planet: Diffusion Models for the Reconstruction of Martian Environments in Virtual Reality

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition arXiv:2510.14765 (cs) [Submitted on 16 Oct 2025 (v1), last revised 2 Mar 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:Inpainting the Red Planet: Diffusion Models for the Reconstruction of Martian Environments in Virtual Reality Authors:Giuseppe Lorenzo Catalano, Agata Marta Soccini View a PDF of the paper titled Inpainting the Red Planet: Diffusion Models for the Reconstruction of Martian Environments in Virtual Reality, by Giuseppe Lorenzo Catalano and 1 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Space exploration increasingly relies on Virtual Reality for several tasks, such as mission planning, multidisciplinary scientific analysis, and astronaut training. A key factor for the reliability of the simulations is having accurate 3D representations of planetary terrains. Extraterrestrial heightmaps derived from satellite imagery often contain missing values due to acquisition and transmission constraints. Mars is among the most studied planets beyond Earth, and its extensive terrain datasets make the Martian surface reconstruction a valuable task, although many areas remain unmapped. Deep learning algorithms can support void-filling tasks; however, whereas Earth's comprehensive datasets enables the use of conditional methods, such approaches cannot be applied to Mars. Current approaches rely on simpler interpolation techniques which, however, often fail to preserve geometric coherence. In this work, we propose a method f...