RaindropGS: A Benchmark for 3D Gaussian Splatting under Raindrop Conditions

Abstract

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) under raindrop conditions suffers from severe occlusions and optical distortions caused by raindrop contamination on the camera lens, substantially degrading reconstruction quality. Existing benchmarks typically evaluate 3DGS using synthetic raindrop images with known camera poses (constrained images), assuming ideal conditions. However, in real-world scenarios, raindrops often interfere with accurate camera pose estimation and point cloud initialization. Moreover, a significant domain gap between synthetic and real raindrops further impairs generalization. To tackle these issues, we introduce RaindropGS, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the full 3DGS pipeline-from unconstrained, raindrop-corrupted images to clear 3DGS reconstructions. Specifically, the whole benchmark pipeline consists of three parts: data preparation, data processing, and raindrop-aware 3DGS evaluation, including types of raindrop interference, camera pose estimation and point cloud initialization, single image rain removal comparison, and 3D Gaussian training comparison. First, we collect a real-world raindrop reconstruction dataset, in which each scene contains three aligned image sets: raindrop-focused, background-focused, and rain-free ground truth, enabling a comprehensive evaluation of reconstruction quality under different focus conditions. Through comprehensive experiments and analyses, we reveal critical insights into the performance limitations of existing 3DGS methods on unconstrained raindrop images and the varying impact of different pipeline components: the impact of camera focus position on 3DGS reconstruction performance, and the interference caused by inaccurate pose and point cloud initialization on reconstruction. These insights establish clear directions for developing more robust 3DGS methods under raindrop conditions.