Abstract

Novel View Synthesis (NVS) for thermal infrared scenarios has become increasingly important in practical applications. Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated its strong performance for NVS, and a handful of preliminary efforts have explored its extension to thermal NVS. However, existing 3DGS-based methods for thermal NVS often suffer from severe local blur in rendered images. Theoretical and empirical analyses reveal that the single-channel nature of thermal data allows intensity discrepancy to be compensated through opacity adjustment, which can erroneously amplify the opacity of floating Gaussians, especially when the background behind them is insufficiently represented. To address this issue, we propose a method termed Floating Gaussian Suppression (FGS) for thermal NVS. Specifically, we leverage an over-saturation of luminance to introduce an implicit gradient penalty, which guides the optimizer to suppress the opacity of floaters to match the ground truth. By effectively reducing the opacity of these floaters, this mechanism alleviates the occlusion of distant details, thereby mitigating local blur. Moreover, to preserve rendering fidelity, the luminance parameters of Gaussians are optimized concurrently. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively mitigates local blur and produces sharper and more faithful thermal reconstruction compared with the baseline methods.

Results

Rendered novel views using our Floating Gaussian Suppression method.

Comparison

Drag the slider to compare FGS (Ours) on the left with 3DGS on the right.

Quantitative Evaluation

Quantitative comparison on TI-NSD and ThermoScenes datasets, where "AVG" denotes the average performance over all the scenes across the two datasets. Best results are highlighted in bold. "↑" indicates higher is better, "↓" indicates lower is better.

TI-NSD ThermoScenes AVG
Method PSNR↑ SSIM↑ LPIPS↓ PSNR↑ SSIM↑ LPIPS↓ PSNR↑ SSIM↑ LPIPS↓
InstantNGP-Base 24.6200.8110.332 27.6100.9180.148 25.6180.8470.271
InstantNGP-Big 24.9100.8120.323 28.0990.9200.146 25.9730.8480.264
Plenoxel 23.2800.8050.390 25.0700.9060.164 23.8770.8390.315
3DGS 32.8520.9430.194 30.9370.9650.073 32.1440.9500.156
PixelGS 34.2160.9540.182 32.4070.9750.064 33.6130.9610.142
AD-GS 33.7140.9510.199 33.4270.9750.062 33.6180.9590.153
NTR-Gaussian 27.8870.9020.291 25.6400.8340.085 27.1380.8820.222
Thermal3D-GS 35.0400.9550.187 32.2610.9730.066 34.1140.9610.147
Veta-GS 35.7030.9570.177 34.5110.9790.056 35.3050.9640.137
FGS (Ours) 36.3300.9600.173 35.9080.9810.051 36.1890.9670.132