# ThermalNeRF: Thermal Radiance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15337 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15337/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [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)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [DeepVoxels: Learning Persistent 3D Feature Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01024/) (2018)
- [ContactDB: Analyzing and Predicting Grasp Contact via Thermal Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06830/) (2019)
- [LU-NeRF: Scene and Pose Estimation by Synchronizing Local Unposed NeRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05410/) (2023)
- [Cross-Spectral Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00648/) (2022)
- [Humans as Light Bulbs: 3D Human Reconstruction from Thermal Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01652/) (2023)
- [CT-MVSNet: Efficient Multi-View Stereo with Cross-scale Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08594/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [SmokeSeer: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Smoke Removal and Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17329/) (2025)
- [SonarSplat: Novel View Synthesis of Imaging Sonar via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00159/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Thermal Polarimetric Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20972/) (2025)
- [SEAR: Simple and Efficient Adaptation of Visual Geometric Transformers for Unpaired RGB+Thermal 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18774/) (2026)
- [Veta-GS: View-dependent deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting for thermal infrared Novel-view Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19138/) (2025)
- [MrGS: Multi-modal Radiance Fields with 3D Gaussian Splatting for RGB-Thermal Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22997/) (2025)
- [PhotonSplat: 3D Scene Reconstruction and Colorization from SPAD Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21680/) (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)
- [DarkVGGT: Seeing Through Darkness Using Thermal Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11326/) (2026)
- [MeGAS: Thermomechanical Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Thermophysical Scene Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23455/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Thermal imaging has a variety of applications, from agricultural monitoring to building inspection to imaging under poor visibility, such as in low light, fog, and rain. However, reconstructing thermal scenes in 3D presents several challenges due to the comparatively lower resolution and limited features present in long-wave infrared (LWIR) images. To overcome these challenges, we propose a unified framework for scene reconstruction from a set of LWIR and RGB images, using a multispectral radiance field to represent a scene viewed by both visible and infrared cameras, thus leveraging information across both spectra. We calibrate the RGB and infrared cameras with respect to each other, as a preprocessing step using a simple calibration target. We demonstrate our method on real-world sets of RGB and LWIR photographs captured from a handheld thermal camera, showing the effectiveness of our method at scene representation across the visible and infrared spectra. We show that our method is capable of thermal super-resolution, as well as visually removing obstacles to reveal objects that are occluded in either the RGB or thermal channels. Please see https://yvette256.github.io/thermalnerf for video results as well as our code and dataset release.