GS-ID: Illumination Decomposition on Gaussian Splatting via Adaptive Light Aggregation and Diffusion-Guided Material Priors
This addresses scene editing limitations in 3D reconstruction for computer graphics applications, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of disentangling geometry, material, and lighting in Gaussian Splatting representations for scene editing, achieving state-of-the-art performance on inverse rendering and relighting benchmarks.
Gaussian Splatting (GS) has emerged as an effective representation for photorealistic rendering, but the underlying geometry, material, and lighting remain entangled, hindering scene editing. Existing GS-based methods struggle to disentangle these components under non-Lambertian conditions, especially in the presence of specularities and shadows. We propose \textbf{GS-ID}, an end-to-end framework for illumination decomposition that integrates adaptive light aggregation with diffusion-based material priors. In addition to a learnable environment map for ambient illumination, we model spatially-varying local lighting using anisotropic spherical Gaussian mixtures (SGMs) that are jointly optimized with scene content. To better capture cast shadows, we associate each splat with a learnable unit vector that encodes shadow directions from multiple light sources, further improving material and lighting estimation. By combining SGMs with intrinsic priors from diffusion models, GS-ID significantly reduces ambiguity in light-material-geometry interactions and achieves state-of-the-art performance on inverse rendering and relighting benchmarks. Experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of GS-ID for downstream applications such as relighting and scene composition.