Reconstruction of a 3D wireframe from a single line drawing via generative depth estimation

Creative Machines Lab, Columbia University

Solving the classic problem of 3D line drawing reconstruction by directly interpolating depth.

Abstract

Reconstructing 3D geometry from 2D engineering line drawings is an inherently ambiguous problem: while visible strokes determine the object’s projected structure, they do not specify the depth of each stroke. Rather than treating this problem as sketch-based asset generation, where models often infer unobserved structure, we study projection-faithful wireframe reconstruction: lifting a user-provided drawing into 3D according to its visible strokes. We formulate this task as conditional depth estimation over line drawings, predicting a depth value for each drawn pixel to produce a 3D wireframe. To model the ambiguities of orthographic projection, we implement a Latent Diffusion Model with spatial conditioning on the input sketch and optional partial-depth conditioning for iterative reconstruction. We train and evaluate our models on over three million synthetic image-depth pairs derived from CAD wireframes, including a newly curated corpus of roughly 90,000 shapes. Across varying shape complexities, our framework achieves robust reconstruction performance; scaling from 256 to 512 resolution with a retrained latent space roughly halves reconstruction error, reaching a 3.9% best-of-five (7.0% average) normalized depth error. These results demonstrate the potential of projection-faithful depth estimation as a user-controlled approach for iterative 3D wireframe creation in engineering design.

Method Overview

Our model’s diffusion architecture involves passing the geometric conditions (x, p, and m) into our conditioning encoder, outputting representations at various resolutions. These representations are then injected via zero-convolutions into the LDM, which predicts the Gaussian noise added to the latent space depth maps.

Sketch-Depth Diffusion model architecture

Qualitative Results

Browse 10 samples reconstructed by our 512×512 model. Each sample includes input sketch, predicted depth, orbit GIF, and an interactive 3D viewer.

Strokes (B-splines) -
Normalized MAE -

Input Sketch

Selected sketch

Predicted Depth

Selected depth map

Wireframe Orbit

Selected wireframe orbit animation

Interactive 3D

BibTeX

@misc{cao2026reconstruction3dwireframesingle,
  title={Reconstruction of a 3D wireframe from a single line drawing via generative depth estimation}, 
  author={Elton Cao and Hod Lipson},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2604.13549},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.CV},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13549}, 
}