Exploration Matters for Escaping the Blur Trap in 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) employs Gaussian primitives for explicit scene representation, facilitating real-time, high-fidelity reconstruction and novel view synthesis of complex scenes. However, the explicit modeling inherent in 3DGS introduces a gradient bias during optimization, rendering its non-convex optimization process highly susceptible to convergence toward local suboptimal solutions. This constitutes a fundamental limitation in 3DGS optimization, which we term the Blur Trap. To address this limitation, we integrate simple explicit exploration into the 3DGS optimization framework. First, through rigorous mathematical analysis of the 3DGS optimization formulation, we identify the underlying optimization bias responsible for the Blur Trap and categorize it into two distinct subtypes: the Far-Side Blur Trap and the Near-Side Blur Trap. Subsequently, we propose two highly straightforward exploration strategies (Random Seeding and Random Splitting) to mitigate the far-side and near-side blur traps, respectively. Experimental validation demonstrates that the incorporation of these exploration operators effectively and complementarily overcome the Blur Trap, achieving high-quality rendering performance across multiple datasets. Project page: https://chengbo-wang.github.io/ExploreGS/

GRAR: Glass-induced Reflection Artifact Removal in LiDAR Point Clouds

Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) point clouds captured in urban environments frequently suffer from glass-induced reflection artifacts, severely degrading downstream applications. Existing reflection artifact removal methods generally rely on ideal reflection symmetry assumptions, yet their performance is limited by inaccurate glass estimation and insufficient geometric representations. To address these issues, we propose a novel unified framework aimed at robust reflection artifact removal: In the first stage, we leverage a multi-modal vision foundation model to produce initial glass masks, which are then refined using geometric cues to achieve high-precision glass regions, followed by glass completion to recover missing regions caused by no-return measurements on transparent surfaces; In the second stage, we propose a physics-driven descriptor, termed Reflection-aware Local-Global Geometric Similarity (RE-LGGS), which is grounded in actual laser reflection geometry and jointly encodes multi-scale geometric structures and orientation consistency using PCA-based local shape representations, thereby significantly improving robustness against imperfect observations. Extensive experiments on multiple public TLS datasets demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in reflection artifacts removal.

$L^3$:Scene-agnostic Visual Localization in the Wild

Standard visual localization methods typically require offline pre-processing of scenes to obtain 3D structural information for better performance. This inevitably introduces additional computational and time costs, as well as the overhead of storing scene representations. Can we visually localize in a wild scene without any off-line preprocessing step? In this paper, we leverage the online inference capabilities of feed-forward 3D reconstruction networks to propose a novel map-free visual localization framework $L^3$. Specifically, by performing direct online 3D reconstruction on RGB images, followed by two-stage metric scale recovery and pose refinement based on 2D-3D correspondences, $L^3$ achieves high accuracy without the need to pre-build or store any offline scene representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate $L^3$ not only that the performance is comparable to state-of-the-art solutions on various benchmarks, but also that it exhibits significantly superior robustness in sparse scenes (fewer reference images per scene).

PIS3R: Very Large Parallax Image Stitching via Deep 3D Reconstruction

Image stitching aim to align two images taken from different viewpoints into one seamless, wider image. However, when the 3D scene contains depth variations and the camera baseline is significant, noticeable parallax occurs-meaning the relative positions of scene elements differ substantially between views. Most existing stitching methods struggle to handle such images with large parallax effectively. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose an image stitching solution called PIS3R that is robust to very large parallax based on the novel concept of deep 3D reconstruction. First, we apply visual geometry grounded transformer to two input images with very large parallax to obtain both intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, as well as the dense 3D scene reconstruction. Subsequently, we reproject reconstructed dense point cloud onto a designated reference view using the recovered camera parameters, achieving pixel-wise alignment and generating an initial stitched image. Finally, to further address potential artifacts such as holes or noise in the initial stitching, we propose a point-conditioned image diffusion module to obtain the refined result.Compared with existing methods, our solution is very large parallax tolerant and also provides results that fully preserve the geometric integrity of all pixels in the 3D photogrammetric context, enabling direct applicability to downstream 3D vision tasks such as SfM. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides accurate stitching results for images with very large parallax, and outperforms the existing methods qualitatively and quantitatively.