Practical High-Fidelity Novel-View Synthesis of Mounted Lepidoptera

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 (the underside of the wings). We introduce an end-to-end pipeline that resolves these challenges to turn such specimens into photo-realistic 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 on four diverse specimens.