Subsurface Scattering for Gaussian Splatting

Jan-Niklas Dihlmann, Arjun Majumdar, Andreas Engelhardt, Raphael Braun, Hendrik Lensch

Keywords: gaussian splatting, inverse rendering, relighting, subsurface scattering, computer graphics, brdf decomposition, pbr, differentiable rendering, nerf

TL;DR: Realtime relighting of subsurface scattering objects in 3D gaussian splatting scenes

Abstract: 3D reconstruction and relighting of objects made from scattering materials present a significant challenge due to the complex light transport beneath the surface. 3D Gaussian Splatting introduced high-quality novel view synthesis at real-time speeds. While 3D Gaussians efficiently approximate an object's surface, they fail to capture the volumetric properties of subsurface scattering. We propose a framework for optimizing an object's shape together with the radiance transfer field given multi-view OLAT (one light at a time) data. Our method decomposes the scene into an explicit surface represented as 3D Gaussians, with a spatially varying BRDF, and an implicit volumetric representation of the scattering component. A learned incident light field accounts for shadowing. We optimize all parameters jointly via ray-traced differentiable rendering. Our approach enables material editing, relighting, and novel view synthesis at interactive rates. We show successful application on synthetic data and contribute a newly acquired multi-view multi-light dataset of objects in a light-stage setup. Compared to previous work we achieve comparable or better results at a fraction of optimization and rendering time while enabling detailed control over material attributes.

Primary Area: Machine vision

Submission Number: 348