Part of International Conference on Representation Learning 2025 (ICLR 2025) Conference
Yuxuan Yao, Zixuan Zeng, Chun Gu, Xiatian Zhu, Li Zhang
Novel view synthesis has experienced significant advancements owing to increasingly capable NeRF- and 3DGS-based methods. However, reflective object reconstruction remains challenging, lacking a proper solution to achieve real-time, high-quality rendering while accommodating inter-reflection. To fill this gap, we introduce a Reflective Gaussian splatting (Ref-Gaussian) framework characterized with two components: (I) Physically based deferred rendering that empowers the rendering equation with pixel-level material properties via formulating split-sum approximation; (II) Gaussian-grounded inter-reflection that realizes the desired inter-reflection function within a Gaussian splatting paradigm for the first time. To enhance geometry modeling, we further introduce material-aware normal propagation and an initial per-Gaussian shading stage, along with 2D Gaussian primitives. Extensive experiments on standard datasets demonstrate that Ref-Gaussian surpasses existing approaches in terms of quantitative metrics, visual quality, and compute efficiency. Further, we show that our method serves as a unified solution for both reflective and non-reflective scenes, going beyond the previous alternatives focusing on only reflective scenes. Also, we illustrate that Ref-Gaussian supports more applications such as relighting and editing.