arXiv · 2609.06665
TransNormal-2: Geometry-Grounded Rectified Flow with Edge-Aware Decoding for Precise Normal Estimation
Abstract
Diffusion-based models enable monocular geometry estimation, yet their pixel-space precision is limited by a shared, under-studied error source: VAE reconstruction degradation. The 8x spatial compression in the VAE encoder-decoder degrades surface normals at object boundaries; even encoding and decoding ground-truth normals introduces 1.3--8.5{\deg} of mean angular error (MAE), with edge MAE reaching 2.8x the global MAE. We present TransNormal-2, a FLUX.2-based rectified-flow framework with single-step deterministic inference that addresses this degradation on both sides of the VAE decoder: in how latent predictions are supervised during training, and in how decoded normals are corrected at inference. First, geometry-aware pixel-space losses, including inverse rendering self-consistency, von~Mises-Fisher angular loss, and wavelet edge-aware regularization, complement latent MSE by enforcing spherical normal geometry and diffuse image-formation cues after VAE decoding. Second, a lightweight Geometric Refinement Module (GRM) applies an RGB-guided residual correction to reduce boundary-localized decoding errors without freely rewriting the coarse prediction. On general-scene benchmarks, TransNormal-2 matches or exceeds MoGe-2 on all eight reported metrics while using only 1.4% as many task-specific normal annotations. The gains are clearest for transparent objects, reducing MAE by 4.2{\deg} on ClearGrasp and 3.1{\deg} on ClearPose over the strongest prior baselines. Code will be released at https://longxiang-ai.github.io/TransNormal-2.
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Mingwei Li, Yi Yang, Hehe Fan. 2026-09-06. TransNormal-2: Geometry-Grounded Rectified Flow with Edge-Aware Decoding for Precise Normal Estimation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06665
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