MaterialRefGS: Reflective Gaussian Splatting with Multi-view Consistent Material Inference
This addresses the challenge of accurate reflection modeling in Gaussian Splatting for computer graphics applications, representing an incremental improvement over prior methods.
The paper tackled the problem of modeling reflections from 2D images for photorealistic rendering and novel view synthesis by proposing a method that enforces multi-view consistent material inference with physically-based environment modeling, achieving state-of-the-art rendering quality on benchmarks.
Modeling reflections from 2D images is essential for photorealistic rendering and novel view synthesis. Recent approaches enhance Gaussian primitives with reflection-related material attributes to enable physically based rendering (PBR) with Gaussian Splatting. However, the material inference often lacks sufficient constraints, especially under limited environment modeling, resulting in illumination aliasing and reduced generalization. In this work, we revisit the problem from a multi-view perspective and show that multi-view consistent material inference with more physically-based environment modeling is key to learning accurate reflections with Gaussian Splatting. To this end, we enforce 2D Gaussians to produce multi-view consistent material maps during deferred shading. We also track photometric variations across views to identify highly reflective regions, which serve as strong priors for reflection strength terms. To handle indirect illumination caused by inter-object occlusions, we further introduce an environment modeling strategy through ray tracing with 2DGS, enabling photorealistic rendering of indirect radiance. Experiments on widely used benchmarks show that our method faithfully recovers both illumination and geometry, achieving state-of-the-art rendering quality in novel views synthesis.