# MGSR: 2D/3D Mutual-boosted Gaussian Splatting for High-fidelity Surface Reconstruction under Various Light Conditions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05182/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2025.

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

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07920/) (2023)
- [OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07525/) (2023)
- [Text-to-3D using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16585/) (2023)
- [PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06521/) (2024)
- [GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/) (2023)
- [GS-IR: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16473/) (2023)
- [3DGS-Avatar: Animatable Avatars via Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09228/) (2023)
- [GALA3D: Towards Text-to-3D Complex Scene Generation via Layout-guided Generative Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07207/) (2024)
- [NeILF: Neural Incident Light Field for Physically-based Material Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07182/) (2022)
- [ASH: Animatable Gaussian Splats for Efficient and Photoreal Human Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05941/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian as a New Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07181/) (2024)
- [StyleGaussian: Instant 3D Style Transfer with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07807/) (2024)
- [NeILF++: Inter-Reflectable Light Fields for Geometry and Material Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17147/) (2023)
- [SpotlessSplats: Ignoring Distractors in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20055/) (2024)
- [SplatFields: Neural Gaussian Splats for Sparse 3D and 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11211/) (2024)
- [Gaga: Group Any Gaussians via 3D-aware Memory Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07977/) (2024)
- [GS-Octree: Octree-based 3D Gaussian Splatting for Robust Object-level 3D Reconstruction Under Strong Lighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18199/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Reflections Unlock: Geometry-Aware Reflection Disentanglement in 3D Gaussian Splatting for Photorealistic Scenes Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06103/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking PhD-Level Coding in 3D Geometric Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.30038/) (2026)
- [RPC-GS: Gaussian Splatting with native RPC Rendering for Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06690/) (2026)
- [Denoising-GS: Gaussian Splatting with Spatial-aware Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14880/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Novel view synthesis (NVS) and surface reconstruction (SR) are essential tasks in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS). Despite recent progress, these tasks are often addressed independently, with GS-based rendering methods struggling under diverse light conditions and failing to produce accurate surfaces, while GS-based reconstruction methods frequently compromise rendering quality. This raises a central question: must rendering and reconstruction always involve a trade-off? To address this, we propose MGSR, a 2D/3D Mutual-boosted Gaussian splatting for Surface Reconstruction that enhances both rendering quality and 3D reconstruction accuracy. MGSR introduces two branches--one based on 2D-GS and the other on 3D-GS. The 2D-GS branch excels in surface reconstruction, providing precise geometry information to the 3D-GS branch. Leveraging this geometry, the 3D-GS branch employs a geometry-guided illumination decomposition module that captures reflected and transmitted components, enabling realistic rendering under varied light conditions. Using the transmitted component as supervision, the 2D-GS branch also achieves high-fidelity surface reconstruction. Throughout the optimization process, the 2D-GS and 3D-GS branches undergo alternating optimization, providing mutual supervision. Prior to this, each branch completes an independent warm-up phase, with an early stopping strategy implemented to reduce computational costs. We evaluate MGSR on a diverse set of synthetic and real-world datasets, at both object and scene levels, demonstrating strong performance in rendering and surface reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/TsingyuanChou/MGSR.