@article{Gao2026, 
author = {Likun Gao and Yijun Feng and Shibang Xiao and Xiaohui Liang},
title = {Occlusion-aware 3D Gaussian splatting for real-time inverse rendering},
year = {2026},
journal = {Computational Visual Media},
volume = {12},
number = {4},
pages = {989-1007},
keywords = {inverse rendering, 3D Gaussian splatting (3GDS), BRDF, occlusion, material prototypes},
url = {https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/CVM.2026.9450563},
doi = {10.26599/CVM.2026.9450563},
abstract = {Inverse rendering from multi-view photographs is an ill-posed problem because it must jointly disentangle geometry, reflectance, and illumination. Existing 3DGS pipelines either optimize all factors in a single stage, failing to model view-dependent occlusion, or split the task into multiple stages, forfeiting end-to-end optimality. We present a one-stage 3DGS inverse-rendering framework that recovers geometry, BRDFs, and view-dependent occlusion in real time. Each Gaussian stores 4th-order spherical-harmonic visibility coefficients learned from splat transparencies, eliminating ray tracing. A prototype-based material prior decouples lighting from reflectance, and deferred split-sum shading keeps the pipeline fully differentiable while enabling HDR relighting. Experiments on indoor and outdoor benchmarks demonstrate that our approach improves inverse-rendering objectives, while remaining competitive on novel-view synthesis compared to strong reconstruction baselines such as 3DGS.}
}