# Leveraging Thermal Modality to Enhance Reconstruction in Low-Light Conditions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14053/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [Scene Representation Networks: Continuous 3D-Structure-Aware Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01618/) (2019)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Argoverse 2: Next Generation Datasets for Self-Driving Perception and Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00493/) (2023)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (2023)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03927/) (2020)
- [Baking Neural Radiance Fields for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14645/) (2021)
- [NeRD: Neural Reflectance Decomposition from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03918/) (2020)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [Target-aware Dual Adversarial Learning and a Multi-scenario Multi-Modality Benchmark to Fuse Infrared and Visible for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16220/) (2022)
- [FSGS: Real-Time Few-shot View Synthesis using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00451/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Luminance-GS: Adapting 3D Gaussian Splatting to Challenging Lighting Conditions with View-Adaptive Curve Adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01503/) (2025)
- [Unifying Color and Lightness Correction with View-Adaptive Curve Adjustment for Robust 3D Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18322/) (2026)
- [Exploiting Semantic Scene Reconstruction for Estimating Building Envelope Characteristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22383/) (2024)
- [MultimodalStudio: A Heterogeneous Sensor Dataset and Framework for Neural Rendering across Multiple Imaging Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19673/) (2025)
- [Towards Integrating Multi-Spectral Imaging with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00989/) (2025)
- [SEAR: Simple and Efficient Adaptation of Visual Geometric Transformers for Unpaired RGB+Thermal 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18774/) (2026)
- [Beyond Darkness: Thermal-Supervised 3D Gaussian Splatting for Low-Light Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13011/) (2025)
- [MrGS: Multi-modal Radiance Fields with 3D Gaussian Splatting for RGB-Thermal Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22997/) (2025)
- [ThermoSplat: Cross-Modal 3D Gaussian Splatting with Feature Modulation and Geometry Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15897/) (2026)
- [Thermal is Always Wild: Characterizing and Addressing Challenges in Thermal-Only Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20448/) (2026)
- [Learning Spectral and Polarimetric Clues for One-to-Multimodal Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02372/) (2026)
- [NOVA-GS: Noise-Aware View-Consistent Gaussian Splatting for Low-Light Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12682/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) accomplishes photo-realistic novel view synthesis by learning the implicit volumetric representation of a scene from multi-view images, which faithfully convey the colorimetric information. However, sensor noises will contaminate low-value pixel signals, and the lossy camera image signal processor will further remove near-zero intensities in extremely dark situations, deteriorating the synthesis performance. Existing approaches reconstruct low-light scenes from raw images but struggle to recover texture and boundary details in dark regions. Additionally, they are unsuitable for high-speed models relying on explicit representations. To address these issues, we present Thermal-NeRF, which takes thermal and visible raw images as inputs, considering the thermal camera is robust to the illumination variation and raw images preserve any possible clues in the dark, to accomplish visible and thermal view synthesis simultaneously. Also, the first multi-view thermal and visible dataset (MVTV) is established to support the research on multimodal NeRF. Thermal-NeRF achieves the best trade-off between detail preservation and noise smoothing and provides better synthesis performance than previous work. Finally, we demonstrate that both modalities are beneficial to each other in 3D reconstruction.