LR-SGS: Robust LiDAR-Reflectance-Guided Salient Gaussian Splatting for Self-Driving Scene Reconstruction

TL;DR

LR-SGS is a novel method that leverages LiDAR reflectance and RGB data to improve 3D scene reconstruction and view synthesis in challenging self-driving environments.

Contribution

It introduces a structure-aware Salient Gaussian representation guided by LiDAR reflectance, enhancing scene detail capture and boundary consistency.

Findings

Achieves superior reconstruction with fewer Gaussians and less training time.

Surpasses state-of-the-art OmniRe by 1.18 dB PSNR on Complex Lighting scenes.

Effectively integrates LiDAR reflectance with RGB for robust scene modeling.

Abstract

Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have demonstrated the feasibility of self-driving scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, most existing methods either rely solely on cameras or use LiDAR only for Gaussian initialization or depth supervision, while the rich scene information contained in point clouds, such as reflectance, and the complementarity between LiDAR and RGB have not been fully exploited, leading to degradation in challenging self-driving scenes, such as those with high ego-motion and complex lighting. To address these issues, we propose a robust and efficient LiDAR-reflectance-guided Salient Gaussian Splatting method (LR-SGS) for self-driving scenes, which introduces a structure-aware Salient Gaussian representation, initialized from geometric and reflectance feature points extracted from LiDAR and refined through a salient transform and improved density control to capture edge and planar structures. Furthermore, we calibrate LiDAR intensity into reflectance and attach it to each Gaussian as a lighting-invariant material channel, jointly aligned with RGB to enforce boundary consistency. Extensive experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that LR-SGS achieves superior reconstruction performance with fewer Gaussians and shorter training time. In particular, on Complex Lighting scenes, our method surpasses OmniRe by 1.18 dB PSNR.