Reconstruction Using the Invisible: Intuition from NIR and Metadata for Enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has rapidly advanced, its application in agriculture remains underexplored. Agricultural scenes present unique challenges for 3D reconstruction methods, particularly due to uneven illumination, occlusions, and a limited field of view. To address these limitations, we introduce NIRPlant, a novel multimodal dataset encompassing Near-Infrared (NIR) imagery, RGB imagery, textual metadata, Depth, and LiDAR data collected under varied indoor and outdoor lighting conditions. By integrating NIR data, our approach enhances robustness and provides crucial botanical insights that extend beyond the visible spectrum. Additionally, we leverage text-based metadata derived from vegetation indices, such as NDVI, NDWI, and the chlorophyll index, which significantly enriches the contextual understanding of complex agricultural environments. To fully exploit these modalities, we propose NIRSplat, an effective multimodal Gaussian splatting architecture employing a crossattention mechanism combined with 3D point-based positional encoding, providing robust geometric priors. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that NIRSplat outperforms existing landmark methods, including 3DGS, CoR-GS, and In-stantSplat, highlighting its effectiveness in challenging agricultural scenarios. The code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/StructuresComp/3D-Reconstruction-NIR * Work done while the author was a visiting researcher at UCLA.