HiGS: Inverse Radiative Transport for Infrared Scenes with Gaussian Primitives

  • Liu Zhenyuan1
  • Bharath Seshadri1
  • George Kopanas2
  • Bernd Bickel1
  • 1ETH Zurich
  • 2Runway ML
SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Conference Papers

Abstract

Thermal imaging, as a promising approach for scalable and robust scene perception, is invaluable for many applications in various fields, such as architecture and building physics. Despite many recent works having demonstrated their capability to incorporate thermal images into radiance field methods, they typically do not explicitly model how radiation interacts and reflects within the scene before reaching the camera, which is essential for inferring thermal physics and properties of objects in a scene. Using Gaussian primitives as the scene representation, our method estimates surface temperature and material properties to generate infrared renderings that closely match the input images. Taking inspirations from radiosity and hemicube rasterization, our method decomposes the outgoing radiation from each Gaussian primitive into two parts: self-emission and reflection originating from other primitives and the environment. This formulation allows us to simulate radiation under novel heating conditions and to find the best-fit temperature and material parameters given thermal images. The method is verified using both synthetic and real capture datasets.

HiGS takes input as thermal images of the same scene at different temperature conditions, infers thermal transport properties, and separate the reflection from the total radiation observed from the camera. It further enables re-heating: re-position the radiator and change its temperature and emissivity, and predict the reflections under the new heating condition.

Overview: hemicube + radiosity + radiance cache

 

HiGS first reconstructs a set of 2D Gaussian primitives that represent the geometry of the scene. Then, we compute the incoming radiance at each Gaussian primitive by rasterizing other primitives using hemicubes, and represent the outgoing radiance using Spherical Gaussian (SG) basis. The outgoing radiance and thermal properties are supervised by the image loss between the reference images and renderings, and a radiosity loss that promotes the separation of reflections.

Results

We validate our method on synthetic dataset. We show reference/rendered total radiation and reflection.

Our method is also tested on real capture data. We move the heated teapot and predict its reflection in the new positions.

Acknowledgments

Bharath Seshadri’s position is funded by the Albert Lück Stiftung via the ETH Zürich Foundation for the project “Extended Reality for Inspection, Assembly, Operations for net-zero carbon infrastructure”. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback; Dominik Stoll for his help with the figures; Jeremy Chew for many insightful discussions; Stanford University Computer Graphics Laboratory for the Stanford Bunny model.

Citation

				
					@inproceedings{zhenyuan2025higs,
  title = {{Inverse Radiative Transport for Infrared Scenes with Gaussian Primitives}},
  booktitle = {ACM} {SIGGRAPH Asia} 2025 {Conference} {Proceedings},
  author = {Zhenyuan, Liu and Seshadri, Bharath and Kopanas, George and Bickel, Bernd},
  year = {2025},
  month = dec,
  doi = {10.1145/3757377.3763938},
}