Ref-DGS: Reflective Dual Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

Reflective appearance, especially strong and typically near-field specular reflections, poses a fundamental challenge for accurate surface reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Existing Gaussian splatting methods either fail to model near-field specular reflections or rely on explicit ray tracing at substantial computational cost. We present Ref-DGS, a reflective dual Gaussian splatting framework that addresses this trade-off by decoupling surface reconstruction from specular reflection within an efficient rasterization-based pipeline. Ref-DGS introduces a dual Gaussian scene representation consisting of geometry Gaussians and complementary local reflection Gaussians that capture near-field specular interactions without explicit ray tracing, along with a global environment reflection field for modeling far-field specular reflections. To predict specular radiance, we further propose a lightweight, physically-aware adaptive mixing shader that fuses global and local reflection features. Experiments demonstrate that Ref-DGS achieves state-of-the-art performance on reflective scenes while training substantially faster than ray-based Gaussian methods.
An overview of our Ref-DGS framework.

Evaluation

We evaluate Ref-DGS on the ShinySynthetic dataset, comparing it against state-of-the-art methods including Ref-Gaussian, Ref-GS, GS-ROR2, and MaterialRefGS. The performance is analyzed across three key dimensions: surface reconstruction accuracy (measured by Normal MAE), novel view synthesis quality (measured by PSNR), and computational efficiency (Training time). As illustrated in the charts, our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines in surface reconstruction with the lowest Normal MAE and achieves superior rendering quality in novel view synthesis. Furthermore, our method demonstrates exceptional efficiency, completing the training in only 12.6 minutes—a substantial speedup compared to other reference-based Gaussian Splatting techniques. For more experimental results on additional datasets, please refer to our paper and supplementary material.

Graph for quality evaluation

Surface Reconstruction

Ours
Ref-GS
Ours
Ref-GS
Ours
Ref-GS
Ours
Ref-GS