Differentiable Light Transport with Gaussian Surfels via Adapted Radiosity for Efficient Relighting and Geometry Reconstruction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jiang, Kaiwen, Sun, Jia-Mu, Li, Zilu, Wang, Dan, Li, Tzu-Mao, Ramamoorthi, Ravi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Jiang, Kaiwen
Sun, Jia-Mu
Li, Zilu
Wang, Dan
Li, Tzu-Mao
Ramamoorthi, Ravi
author_facet Jiang, Kaiwen
Sun, Jia-Mu
Li, Zilu
Wang, Dan
Li, Tzu-Mao
Ramamoorthi, Ravi
contents Radiance fields have gained tremendous success with applications ranging from novel view synthesis to geometry reconstruction, especially with the advent of Gaussian splatting. However, they sacrifice modeling of material reflective properties and lighting conditions, leading to significant geometric ambiguities and the inability to easily perform relighting. One way to address these limitations is to incorporate physically-based rendering, but it has been prohibitively expensive to include full global illumination within the inner loop of the optimization. Therefore, previous works adopt simplifications that make the whole optimization with global illumination effects efficient but less accurate. In this work, we adopt Gaussian surfels as the primitives and build an efficient framework for differentiable light transport, inspired from the classic radiosity theory. The whole framework operates in the coefficient space of spherical harmonics, enabling both diffuse and specular materials. We extend the classic radiosity into non-binary visibility and semi-opaque primitives, propose novel solvers to efficiently solve the light transport, and derive the backward pass for gradient optimizations, which is more efficient than auto-differentiation. During inference, we achieve view-independent rendering where light transport need not be recomputed under viewpoint changes, enabling hundreds of FPS for global illumination effects, including view-dependent reflections using a spherical harmonics representation. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate superior geometry reconstruction, view synthesis and relighting than previous inverse rendering baselines, or data-driven baselines given relatively sparse datasets with known or unknown lighting conditions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_18497
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differentiable Light Transport with Gaussian Surfels via Adapted Radiosity for Efficient Relighting and Geometry Reconstruction
Jiang, Kaiwen
Sun, Jia-Mu
Li, Zilu
Wang, Dan
Li, Tzu-Mao
Ramamoorthi, Ravi
Graphics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Radiance fields have gained tremendous success with applications ranging from novel view synthesis to geometry reconstruction, especially with the advent of Gaussian splatting. However, they sacrifice modeling of material reflective properties and lighting conditions, leading to significant geometric ambiguities and the inability to easily perform relighting. One way to address these limitations is to incorporate physically-based rendering, but it has been prohibitively expensive to include full global illumination within the inner loop of the optimization. Therefore, previous works adopt simplifications that make the whole optimization with global illumination effects efficient but less accurate. In this work, we adopt Gaussian surfels as the primitives and build an efficient framework for differentiable light transport, inspired from the classic radiosity theory. The whole framework operates in the coefficient space of spherical harmonics, enabling both diffuse and specular materials. We extend the classic radiosity into non-binary visibility and semi-opaque primitives, propose novel solvers to efficiently solve the light transport, and derive the backward pass for gradient optimizations, which is more efficient than auto-differentiation. During inference, we achieve view-independent rendering where light transport need not be recomputed under viewpoint changes, enabling hundreds of FPS for global illumination effects, including view-dependent reflections using a spherical harmonics representation. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate superior geometry reconstruction, view synthesis and relighting than previous inverse rendering baselines, or data-driven baselines given relatively sparse datasets with known or unknown lighting conditions.
title Differentiable Light Transport with Gaussian Surfels via Adapted Radiosity for Efficient Relighting and Geometry Reconstruction
topic Graphics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18497