PolarGuide-GSDR: 3D Gaussian Splatting Driven by Polarization Priors and Deferred Reflection for Real-World Reflective Scenes

Derui Shan, Qian Qiao, Hao Lu, Tao Du, Peng Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 26000-26009

Polarization-aware Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) enables novel view synthesis of specular scenes but suffers from slow training, inefficient rendering, and material/viewpoint assumptions. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) supports real-time rendering but struggles with reflection reconstruction due to reflection-geometry entanglement. We propose PolarGuide-GSDR, a polarization-guided framework that leverages polarization information to separate specular reflections for guided reconstruction, and builds bidirectional iterative optimization between polarization and 3DGS: it first uses 3DGS geometric priors to disambiguate polarization, then uses refined polarization normal to guide 3DGS normals and Spherical Harmonics representations, achieving high-fidelity reflection separation and full-scene reconstruction without restrictive material assumptions. Experiments on public and self-collected datasets show that PolarGuide-GSDR achieves state-of-the-art performance in specular reconstruction, normal estimation, and novel view synthesis, while maintaining real-time rendering. To our knowledge, this is the first framework embedding polarization priors into 3DGS optimization, offering superior interpretability and real-time performance for complex reflective scenes.