GS-IR: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering

We propose GS-IR, a novel inverse rendering approach based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that leverages forward mapping volume rendering to achieve photorealistic novel view synthesis and relighting results. Unlike previous works that use implicit neural representations and volume rendering (e.g. NeRF), which suffer from low expressive power and high computational complexity, we extend 3DGS, a top-performance representation for novel view synthesis, to estimate scene geometry, surface material, and environment illumination from multi-view images captured under unknown lighting conditions. There are two main problems when introducing 3DGS to inverse rendering: 1) 3DGS does not support producing plausible normal natively; 2) forward mapping (e.g. rasterization and splatting) cannot trace the occlusion like backward mapping (e.g. ray tracing). To address these challenges, our GS-IR proposes an efficient optimization scheme incorporating a depthderivation-based regularization for normal estimation and a baking-based occlusion to model indirect lighting. The flexible and expressive 3DGS representation allows us to achieve fast and compact geometry reconstruction, photorealistic novel view synthesis, and effective physically-based rendering. We demonstrate the superiority of our method over baseline methods through qualitative and quantitative evaluations of various challenging scenes. The source code is available at https://github.com/lzhnb/GS- IR.