RIDE-Splat: Reflection Removal for In-the-Wild Driving Environments

Overview & Synopsis

Driving video captured through a windshield violates the world-space consistency assumed by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS): the road scene exhibits parallax while cabin reflections remain attached to the camera, causing standard 3DGS to embed reflected content into the reconstructed scene. We introduce RIDE-Splat, a pipeline for reflection-free 3D reconstruction from posed driving video without clean images, reflection masks, or pretrained networks. RIDE-Splat assigns world-consistent transmission through the windshield to a 3DGS scene and the dominant camera-attached reflection to one shared, signed RGB image. It builds the clean reconstruction in two passes. First, it learns the 3D geometry and the signed reflection image, representing both added radiance and transmission attenuation. Then, it uses the reflection-removed training images to fit a clean 3DGS model. At inference, the reflection image is discarded, preserving the standard 3DGS rendering path. We also introduce the RIDE-Splat Dataset, the first 3D reconstruction benchmark for reflection removal from driving video -- with real driving scenes, physical windshield reflections in training views, and separately captured non-reflective evaluation images. Across the RIDE-Splat Dataset, XLD, and Wayve, RIDE-Splat outperforms 3DGS, DC-Gaussian, and RobustSplat on all nine aggregate metrics, improving PSNR by up to 3.59 dB and reducing LPIPS by up to 0.0876. We achieve the highest metrics in 38 out of 42 per-scene comparisons and removes windshield reflections that remain visible in the baselines while preserving the transmitted scene.