# Look Gauss, No Pose: Novel View Synthesis using Gaussian Splatting without Accurate Pose Initialization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08743 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08743/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06405/) (2021)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [iMAP: Implicit Mapping and Positioning in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12352/) (2021)
- [INeRF: Inverting Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05877/) (2020)
- [NoPe-NeRF: Optimising Neural Radiance Field with No Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07388/) (2022)
- [Self-Calibrating Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13826/) (2021)
- [COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07504/) (2023)
- [A micro Lie theory for state estimation in robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01537/) (2018)
- [GARF: Gaussian Activated Radiance Fields for High Fidelity Reconstruction and Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05735/) (2022)
- [NeRF-Pose: A First-Reconstruct-Then-Regress Approach for Weakly-supervised 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04802/) (2022)
- [Parallel Inversion of Neural Radiance Fields for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10108/) (2022)
- [Tangent Space Backpropagation for 3D Transformation Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12032/) (2021)
- [Robust Camera Pose Refinement for Multi-Resolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01571/) (2023)
- [Improving Robustness for Joint Optimization of Camera Poses and Decomposed Low-Rank Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13252/) (2024)
- [Nerfels: Renderable Neural Codes for Improved Camera Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01916/) (2022)
- [BAA-NGP: Bundle-Adjusting Accelerated Neural Graphics Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04166/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Instant Gaussian Stream: Fast and Generalizable Streaming of Dynamic Scene Reconstruction via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16979/) (2025)
- [GSemSplat: Generalizable Semantic 3D Gaussian Splatting from Uncalibrated Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16932/) (2024)
- [Targetless LiDAR-Camera Calibration with Neural Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04597/) (2025)
- [Splannequin: Freezing Monocular Mannequin-Challenge Footage with Dual-Detection Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05113/) (2025)
- [GaussianFlow SLAM: Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM Guided by GaussianFlow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15612/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as a powerful tool for fast and accurate novel-view synthesis from a set of posed input images. However, like most novel-view synthesis approaches, it relies on accurate camera pose information, limiting its applicability in real-world scenarios where acquiring accurate camera poses can be challenging or even impossible. We propose an extension to the 3D Gaussian Splatting framework by optimizing the extrinsic camera parameters with respect to photometric residuals. We derive the analytical gradients and integrate their computation with the existing high-performance CUDA implementation. This enables downstream tasks such as 6-DoF camera pose estimation as well as joint reconstruction and camera refinement. In particular, we achieve rapid convergence and high accuracy for pose estimation on real-world scenes. Our method enables fast reconstruction of 3D scenes without requiring accurate pose information by jointly optimizing geometry and camera poses, while achieving state-of-the-art results in novel-view synthesis. Our approach is considerably faster to optimize than most competing methods, and several times faster in rendering. We show results on real-world scenes and complex trajectories through simulated environments, achieving state-of-the-art results on LLFF while reducing runtime by two to four times compared to the most efficient competing method. Source code will be available at https://github.com/Schmiddo/noposegs .