# PanoLess: Environment Reconstruction from Partial Reflective Views

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25362 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25362/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [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)
- [Ref-NeRF: Structured View-Dependent Appearance for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03907/) (2021)
- [Extracting Triangular 3D Models, Materials, and Lighting From Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12503/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)
- [GS-IR: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16473/) (2023)
- [Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01339/) (2024)
- [NeRO: Neural Geometry and BRDF Reconstruction of Reflective Objects from Multiview Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17398/) (2023)
- [High-quality Surface Reconstruction using Gaussian Surfels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17774/) (2024)
- [Relightable 3D Gaussians: Realistic Point Cloud Relighting with BRDF Decomposition and Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16043/) (2023)
- [DN-Splatter: Depth and Normal Priors for Gaussian Splatting and Meshing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17822/) (2024)
- [Spec-Gaussian: Anisotropic View-Dependent Appearance for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15870/) (2024)
- [ENVIDR: Implicit Differentiable Renderer with Neural Environment Lighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13022/) (2023)
- [DiffusionLight: Light Probes for Free by Painting a Chrome Ball](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09168/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting with Deferred Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18454/) (2024)
- [IRGS: Inter-Reflective Gaussian Splatting with 2D Gaussian Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15867/) (2024)
- [HDR Environment Map Estimation for Real-Time Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10687/) (2020)
- [Reflective Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19282/) (2024)
- [EnvGS: Modeling View-Dependent Appearance with Environment Gaussian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15215/) (2024)
- [Neural Radiosity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12319/) (2021)
- [GaussianRoom: Improving 3D Gaussian Splatting with SDF Guidance and Monocular Cues for Indoor Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19671/) (2024)
- [Ref-GS: Directional Factorization for 2D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00905/) (2024)
- [MaterialRefGS: Reflective Gaussian Splatting with Multi-view Consistent Material Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11387/) (2025)
- [Mirror-3DGS: Incorporating Mirror Reflections into 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01168/) (2024)
- [REFRAME: Reflective Surface Real-Time Rendering for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16481/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reflections from shiny objects and glass facades naturally extend the field of view of a camera, capturing the surrounding environment without the need to pan the camera or acquire a full panorama. We propose PanoLess, a Gaussian-splat-based framework that reconstructs the surrounding environment as a distant illumination map from images captured on only one side of a reflective surface. PanoLess leverages surface-aligned 2D Gaussian splats with deferred shading to recover accurate per-pixel normals and reflection cues, which are fused into a neural cubemap representation of the environment. In addition, PanoLess produces a visibility map that explicitly denotes which regions of the environment are supported by the partial reflective observations. Unlike existing inverse-rendering and reflection-aware Gaussian-splatting approaches, which typically require full 360-degree coverage and struggle under incomplete views, PanoLess enables consistent, physically grounded illumination estimation from partial-view input. We show that PanoLess achieves high-fidelity and geometrically consistent environment reconstruction, outperforming reflection-aware baselines on a new custom synthetic benchmark and publicly available datasets, and demonstrating generalization to real-world reflective captures.