LightHarmony3D: Harmonizing Illumination and Shadows for Object Insertion in 3D Gaussian Splatting
This addresses a problem for AR/VR, virtual staging, and digital content creation by enabling interactive editing with illumination consistency, though it is incremental as it builds on existing 3DGS capabilities.
The paper tackles the challenge of achieving physically consistent lighting and shadows when inserting external mesh objects into 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes, presenting LightHarmony3D, which uses a generative module to predict HDR environment maps and achieves state-of-the-art realism and multi-view consistency in experiments.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity reconstruction of scene geometry and appearance. Building on this capability, inserting external mesh objects into reconstructed 3DGS scenes enables interactive editing and content augmentation for immersive applications such as AR/VR, virtual staging, and digital content creation. However, achieving physically consistent lighting and shadows for mesh insertion remains challenging, as it requires accurate scene illumination estimation and multi-view consistent rendering. To address this challenge, we present LightHarmony3D, a novel framework for illumination-consistent mesh insertion in 3DGS scenes. Central to our approach is our proposed generative module that predicts a full 360° HDR environment map at the insertion location via a single forward pass. By leveraging generative priors instead of iterative optimization, our method efficiently captures dominant scene illumination and enables physically grounded shading and shadows for inserted meshes while maintaining multi-view coherence. Furthermore, we introduce the first dedicated benchmark for mesh insertion in 3DGS, providing a standardized evaluation framework for assessing lighting consistency and photorealism. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world reconstruction datasets demonstrate that LightHarmony3D achieves state-of-the-art realism and multi-view consistency.