Casual Flash Lighting for Gaussian Splat Inverse Rendering

Abstract

Recovering geometry, materials, and lighting from photographs is highly ambiguous when only static illumination is available. Active-lighting setups reduce the ambiguity but require dark rooms or specialized hardware. Instead, we synergize both static and flash lighting from casual indoor capture, with the flash on or off, each from independent viewpoints. The flash residual constrains albedo and the BRDF, while static lighting captures grazing-angle specular highlights that flash misses. With a 2DGS reconstruction framing, our key contribution is a GS-anchored diffuse field: a hash-encoded MLP is queried at the rasterized 2DGS depth. As it depends only on world position, it is view consistent in 3D and allows the flash residual to drive material decomposition instead of being absorbed by alpha-blending drift across views. At the same time, we render static lighting with deferred shading such that it can also supervise material decomposition. On five synthetic and three real indoor scenes, our method outperforms six recent baselines on diffuse color, albedo and roughness material parameters, and in relighting where PSNR improves by 4.17 dB over the next-best baseline.