SunFaded: Illumination-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Dark Scenes with Camera-Mounted Active Lighting

Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a popular 3D representation technique, but still struggles with appearance inconsistencies, especially in dark scenes that require active illumination (e.g., camera flashes or co-moving light sources) to capture usable images, leading to dramatic local appearance fluctuations.While existing methods mainly focus on modeling global appearance changes for in-the-wild scenes, such as those caused by different times of day or weather conditions, they fail to handle the severe variations present in dark scenes with moving light sources.In this paper, we propose a novel Gaussian Splatting–based approach for constructing scene representations in dark scenes where active light sources are rigidly attached to the camera and move together with it.Within this framework, we introduce an illumination-weighted loss function that drives the representation toward the underlying unlit scene. Furthermore, instead of adjusting the illumination of each individual Gaussian as in prior work, we employ a tile-based shading scheme that operates directly on the rendered images, greatly reducing computational cost while explicitly separating illumination from intrinsic scene appearance.Additionally, we further refine the learned Gaussian representation by combining the recovered unlit scene appearance with an advanced geometric prior model, which significantly improves geometric accuracy.Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior reconstruction quality in challenging environments compared to state-of-the-art techniques.