Beyond Darkness: Thermal-Supervised 3D Gaussian Splatting for Low-Light Novel View Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces DTGS, a novel framework combining thermal supervision and Retinex-inspired decomposition within 3D Gaussian Splatting to improve low-light novel view synthesis, ensuring consistent geometry and color across views.

Contribution

The paper proposes a unified, joint optimization approach that integrates thermal guidance and physical reflectance-illumination separation into 3D Gaussian Splatting for low-light conditions, unlike prior separate enhancement methods.

Findings

DTGS outperforms existing methods in low-light 3D reconstruction.

Constructed RGBT-LOW dataset for evaluation.

Achieves superior radiometric and geometric consistency.

Abstract

Under extremely low-light conditions, novel view synthesis (NVS) faces severe degradation in terms of geometry, color consistency, and radiometric stability. Standard 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) pipelines fail when applied directly to underexposed inputs, as independent enhancement across views causes illumination inconsistencies and geometric distortion. To address this, we present DTGS, a unified framework that tightly couples Retinex-inspired illumination decomposition with thermal-guided 3D Gaussian Splatting for illumination-invariant reconstruction. Unlike prior approaches that treat enhancement as a pre-processing step, DTGS performs joint optimization across enhancement, geometry, and thermal supervision through a cyclic enhancement-reconstruction mechanism. A thermal supervisory branch stabilizes both color restoration and geometry learning by dynamically balancing enhancement, structural, and thermal losses. Moreover, a Retinex-based decomposition module embedded within the 3DGS loop provides physically interpretable reflectance-illumination separation, ensuring consistent color and texture across viewpoints. To evaluate our method, we construct RGBT-LOW, a new multi-view low-light thermal dataset capturing severe illumination degradation. Extensive experiments show that DTGS significantly outperforms existing low-light enhancement and 3D reconstruction baselines, achieving superior radiometric consistency, geometric fidelity, and color stability under extreme illumination.