SmokeGS-R: Physics-Guided Pseudo-Clean 3DGS for Real-World Multi-View Smoke Restoration

TL;DR

This paper introduces SmokeGS-R, a physics-guided pipeline for multi-view smoke restoration that decouples geometry recovery from appearance correction, achieving improved reconstruction quality.

Contribution

The novel approach combines physics-based pseudo-clean supervision with a geometry-first reconstruction strategy and post-render appearance harmonization.

Findings

Achieved PSNR of 15.217 and SSIM of 0.666 on challenge test data.

Outperformed the official baseline by +3.68 dB PSNR on challenge scenes.

Code is publicly available at the provided GitHub repository.

Abstract

Real-world smoke simultaneously attenuates scene radiance, adds airlight, and destabilizes multi-view appearance consistency, making robust 3D reconstruction particularly difficult. We present \textbf{SmokeGS-R}, a practical pipeline developed for the NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction Track 2 challenge. The key idea is to decouple geometry recovery from appearance correction: we generate physics-guided pseudo-clean supervision with a refined dark channel prior and guided filtering, train a sharp clean-only 3D Gaussian Splatting source model, and then harmonize its renderings with a donor ensemble using geometric-mean reference aggregation, LAB-space Reinhard transfer, and light Gaussian smoothing. On the official challenge testing leaderboard, the final submission achieved \mbox{PSNR $=15.217$} and \mbox{SSIM $=0.666$}. After the public release of RealX3D, we re-evaluated the same frozen result on the seven released challenge scenes without retraining and obtained \mbox{PSNR $=15.209$}, \mbox{SSIM $=0.644$}, and \mbox{LPIPS $=0.551$}, outperforming the strongest official baseline average on the same scenes by $+3.68$ dB PSNR. These results suggest that a geometry-first reconstruction strategy combined with stable post-render appearance harmonization is an effective recipe for real-world multi-view smoke restoration. The code is available at https://github.com/windrise/3drr_Track2_SmokeGS-R.