WildSplatter: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Appearance Control from Unconstrained Images

arXiv cs.CV / 4/24/2026

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Key Points

  • WildSplatter introduces a feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) approach that works with unconstrained images where camera parameters are unknown and lighting varies.
  • Instead of iterative multi-view optimization used by typical 3DGS pipelines, the method jointly learns 3D Gaussian scene representation and appearance embeddings directly from input images.
  • By conditioning on the input, it provides controllable modulation of Gaussian colors to account for large changes in illumination and appearance.
  • The authors report reconstructing 3D Gaussians from sparse views in under one second and achieving better results than prior pose-free 3DGS methods on real-world datasets with varying lighting.
  • Overall, WildSplatter aims to make pose-free, appearance-controllable 3D scene reconstruction faster and more robust for real-world photo collections.

Abstract

We propose WildSplatter, a feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model for unconstrained images with unknown camera parameters and varying lighting conditions. 3DGS is an effective scene representation that enables high-quality, real-time rendering; however, it typically requires iterative optimization and multi-view images captured under consistent lighting with known camera parameters. WildSplatter is trained on unconstrained photo collections and jointly learns 3D Gaussians and appearance embeddings conditioned on input images. This design enables flexible modulation of Gaussian colors to represent significant variations in lighting and appearance. Our method reconstructs 3D Gaussians from sparse input views in under one second, while also enabling appearance control under diverse lighting conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing pose-free 3DGS methods on challenging real-world datasets with varying illumination.