Seeing Through Reflections: Advancing 3D Scene Reconstruction in Mirror-Containing Environments with Gaussian Splatting

Abstract: Mirror-containing environments pose unique challenges for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis (NVS), as reflective surfaces introduce view-dependent distortions and inconsistencies. While cutting-edge methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excel in typical scenes, their performance deteriorates in the presence of mirrors. Existing solutions mainly focus on handling mirror surfaces through symmetry mapping but often overlook the rich information carried by mirror reflections. These reflections offer complementary perspectives that can fill in absent details and significantly enhance reconstruction quality. To advance 3D reconstruction in mirror-rich environments, we present MirrorScene3D, a comprehensive dataset featuring diverse indoor scenes, 1256 high-quality images, and annotated mirror masks, providing a benchmark for evaluating reconstruction methods in reflective settings. Building on this, we propose ReflectiveGS, an extension of 3D Gaussian Splatting that utilizes mirror reflections as complementary viewpoints rather than simple symmetry artifacts, enhancing scene geometry and recovering absent details. Experiments on MirrorScene3D show that ReflectiveGaussian outperforms existing methods in SSIM, PSNR, LPIPS, and training speed, setting a new benchmark for 3D reconstruction in mirror-rich environments.