# SmokeSeer: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Smoke Removal and Scene Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17329 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17329/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [MASt3R-SfM: a Fully-Integrated Solution for Unconstrained Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19152/) (2024)
- [RGB-T Object Tracking:Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08982/) (2018)
- [Fully Explicit Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15629/) (2024)
- [Physics Informed Neural Fields for Smoke Reconstruction with Sparse Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06577/) (2022)
- [MINIMA: Modality Invariant Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19412/) (2024)
- [ScatterNeRF: Seeing Through Fog with Physically-Based Inverse Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02103/) (2023)
- [ThermalNeRF: Thermal Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15337/) (2024)
- [DehazeNeRF: Multiple Image Haze Removal and 3D Shape Reconstruction using Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11364/) (2023)
- [Desmoking laparoscopy surgery images using an image-to-image translation guided by an embedded dark channel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08947/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [SEAR: Simple and Efficient Adaptation of Visual Geometric Transformers for Unpaired RGB+Thermal 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18774/) (2026)
- [Thermal is Always Wild: Characterizing and Addressing Challenges in Thermal-Only Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20448/) (2026)
- [Dehaze-GaussianImage: Zero-Shot Dehazing via Efficient 2D Gaussian Splatting Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16163/) (2026)
- [Fi-Gaussian: Frequency-Aware Implicit Gaussian Splatting for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16168/) (2026)
- [FujinSplat: Seeing Through Smoke with RAW-Domain Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06017/) (2026)
- [Tri-DehazeGS: Scene--Medium Decoupled Gaussian Splatting with Transmittance-Aware Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11223/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Smoke in real-world scenes can severely degrade image quality and hamper visibility. Recent image restoration methods either rely on data-driven priors that are susceptible to hallucinations, or are limited to static low-density smoke. We introduce SmokeSeer, a method for simultaneous 3D scene reconstruction and smoke removal from multi-view video sequences. Our method uses thermal and RGB images, leveraging the reduced scattering in thermal images to see through smoke. We build upon 3D Gaussian splatting to fuse information from the two image modalities, and decompose the scene into smoke and non-smoke components. Unlike prior work, SmokeSeer handles a broad range of smoke densities and adapts to temporally varying smoke. We validate our method on synthetic data and a new real-world smoke dataset with RGB and thermal images. We provide an open-source implementation and data on the project website.