Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration
Authors: Kyoleen Kwak, Daeho Kim, Jeong Woon Lee, Hyoseok Hwang
Abstract
Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.
Accurate camera-LiDAR calibration is a prerequisite for robust multi-modal perception in robotics. Recent target-less approaches based on deep point correspondences achieve remarkable performance for extrinsic calibration but assume rectified images with known intrinsics. In this work, we overcome this limitation and present the first fully target-less pipeline that jointly estimates camera intrinsics (pinhole model with radial-tangential distortion) and camera-LiDAR extrinsics with deep pixel-point correspondences. Our approach extends deep correspondence-based calibration by (i) automatic intrinsic initialization via structure-from-motion, (ii) generalizing camera-LiDAR matching to raw images with unknown intrinsics including distortion, and (iii) tightly coupling correspondence estimation with joint nonlinear optimization over both intrinsics and extrinsics. We evaluate our method on the KITTI dataset with unseen camera-LiDAR pairs and demonstrate that joint calibration achieves improved extrinsic accuracy while additionally recovering accurate intrinsics.
In this study, we develop a Structured framework for Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with LiDAR integration (Structured-Li-GS). It is a lightweight Gaussian Splatting pipeline that leverages LiDAR-inertial-visual SLAM. Structured-Li-GS achieves high-quality 3D reconstructions with fewer Gaussians by training on accurate, dense, colorized point clouds. Gaussian primitives are anchored using sub-sampled point clouds, and their ellipsoidal parameters are initialized from local surface geometry. Our training strategy integrates a comprehensive set of loss terms, including photometric, flattening, offset, depth, and normal losses, guided by the dense point cloud, enabling accurate reconstruction without Gaussian densification. This approach produces up-to-scale, high-fidelity results with a moderate model size. For experimental validation, we develop a custom hardware-synchronized LiDAR-camera handheld scanner. Experiments on both benchmark datasets and our real-world in-house dataset demonstrate that Structured-Li-GS surpasses state-of-the-art methods while using fewer Gaussians.
Gaussian Splatting has enabled real-time neural rendering, yet existing LiDAR-inertial-visual (LIV) Gaussian mapping pipelines remain fragile under illumination changes and texture-deficient scenes due to their reliance on RGB photometric cues. We present LIT-GS, a LiDAR-inertial-thermal Gaussian Splatting framework that injects LiDAR-derived plane geometry as an explicit constraint in both pose/structure refinement and Gaussian optimization. Specifically, we exploit LIV visual map points as confidence-aware cross-modal anchors to establish reliable thermal-LiDAR associations, and incorporate weighted LiDAR point-to-plane residuals into bundle adjustment to jointly refine camera poses and 3D points under weak thermal supervision. Building on the refined structure, we further introduce a LiDAR-plane-regularized differentiable splatting objective that constrains rendered 3D points to align with locally observed planes, mitigating surface thickening and structural drift in low-contrast thermal imagery. Experiments on proprietary sequences and public datasets demonstrate that LIT-GS consistently improves geometric accuracy and rendering quality over state-of-the-art LIV-based Gaussian Splatting baselines, particularly in challenging lighting conditions.