# scomnigs_selfcalibrating_omnidirectional_gaussian_splatting__bfa9f7c3.pdf Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 SC-OMNIGS: SELF-CALIBRATING OMNIDIRECTIONAL GAUSSIAN SPLATTING Huajian Huang1 Yingshu Chen1 Longwei Li2 Hui Cheng2 Tristan Braud1 Yajie Zhao3 Sai-Kit Yeung1 1 The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 2 Sun Yat-sen University 3 ICT, University of Southern California 360-degree cameras streamline data collection for radiance field 3D reconstruction by capturing comprehensive scene data. However, traditional radiance field methods do not address the specific challenges inherent to 360-degree images. We present SC-Omni GS, a novel self-calibrating omnidirectional Gaussian splatting system for fast and accurate omnidirectional radiance field reconstruction using 360-degree images. Rather than converting 360-degree images to cube maps and performing perspective image calibration, we treat 360-degree images as a whole sphere and derive a mathematical framework that enables direct omnidirectional camera pose calibration accompanied by 3D Gaussians optimization. Furthermore, we introduce a differentiable omnidirectional camera model in order to rectify the distortion of real-world data for performance enhancement. Overall, the omnidirectional camera intrinsic model, extrinsic poses, and 3D Gaussians are jointly optimized by minimizing weighted spherical photometric loss. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed SC-Omni GS is able to recover a high-quality radiance field from noisy camera poses or even no pose prior in challenging scenarios characterized by wide baselines and non-object-centric configurations. The noticeable performance gain in the real-world dataset captured by consumer-grade omnidirectional cameras verifies the effectiveness of our general omnidirectional camera model in reducing the distortion of 360-degree images. 1 INTRODUCTION The radiance field techniques pioneered by Ne RF (Mildenhall et al., 2020) have become an essential paradigm to facilitate scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Ne RF-based approaches (Barron et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2020; Barron et al., 2022; Fridovich-Keil et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2022; M uller et al., 2022) implicitly representing the structure and appearance of captured objects generally necessitate a dense set of calibrated images for training. However, Ne RF requires comprehensive data capture to reconstruct a scene accurately. 360-degree images can greatly facilitate such data capture. Previous works, such as Huang et al. (2022) and Chen et al. (2023b), have demonstrated the feasibility and efficiency of reconstructing omnidirectional radiance fields in large scenes using sparse and wide-baseline 360-degree image inputs. Although 360-degree images have shown potential in reconstructing omnidirectional radiance fields, the quality of the reconstructed models is highly dependent on the accuracy of camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. Existing methods for recovering 3D information from 360-degree images, including structure-from-motion (Sf M) systems (Moulon et al., 2013; Huang & Yeung, 2022), rely on an idealized spherical camera model to describe the mathematical relationship between 2D 360degree images and 3D world projection. The 360-degree images are typically obtained by stitching multiple wide angle images, inheriting the distortion from each lens and resulting in a complex distortion pattern. The adverse impact of such distortion is neglected in the idealized spherical camera model. Consequently, the inaccurate camera projection modeling leads to poor Sf M pose estimation, ultimately compromising the quality of 3D radiance field reconstruction when using real-world data. To enhance system performance under camera perturbation and reduce reliance Equal contribution. Corresponding author: huajian@ust.hk Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Figure 1: SC-Omni GS jointly optimizes the omnidirectional camera model, poses, and 3D Gaussians using a differentiable omnidirectional rasterizer. It can achieve rapid radiance field reconstruction with no pose prior and render high-fidelity novel views. on Sf M, some approaches (Lin et al., 2021; Jeong et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2023a; Park et al., 2023) have explored radiance field self-calibration, where camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters are jointly optimized with the radiance field representation. However, these solutions focus on traditional images, using well-established camera models for perspective cameras. A naive approach to self-calibrating the omnidirectional radiance field would consist of projecting the 360-degree images onto cube maps with perspective images. However, this approach undermines the integrity of 360-degree images, leading to increasing optimization complexity and instability (Huang et al., 2024b). Given the lack of camera models accounting for the distortion of 360-degree images and the limitations of existing self-calibration approaches, there is an urgent need for a framework that calibrates the omnidirectional camera model and poses directly. In this paper, we propose SC-Omni GS, a novel system that self-calibrates the omnidirectional camera model and poses along with omnidirectional radiance field reconstruction. We leverage 3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) techniques (Kerbl et al., 2023) to represent radiance fields by a set of 3D Gaussians with explicit positions, covariances, and spherical harmonic coefficients, accelerating the optimization process. In order to realize self-calibrating omnidirectional Gaussian splatting, we adopt a differentiable rasterizer that renders omnidirectional images by splatting 3D Gaussians onto a unit sphere (Li et al., 2024). Crucially, we derive omnidirectional camera pose gradients within the rendering procedure, enabling the optimization of noisy camera poses and even learning from scratch. An example is illustrated in Figure 1. To rectify distortion patterns in the input image, we propose a differentiable omnidirectional camera model comprising a learnable 3D spherical grid to regress the camera distortion. We thus obtain undistorted omnidirectional images by re-sampling input images based on the learned omnidirectional camera model. We jointly optimize 3D Gaussians, camera poses, and camera models by minimizing photometric loss between rendered and undistorted omnidirectional images. The overview of SC-Omni GS framework is demonstrated in Figure 2. Moreover, considering omnidirectional images in the equirectangular projection have an unbalanced spatial resolution, we introduce weighted spherical photometric loss to ensure the spatially equivalent optimization. Furthermore, we apply an anisotropy regularizer to constrain 3D Gaussian scales preventing the generation of filamentous kernels, particularly near the polar areas. To verify the efficacy of SC-Omni GS, we conducted extensive experiments using a synthetic dataset Omni Blender (Choi et al., 2023) and a real-world 360Roam dataset (Huang et al., 2022). The results showed that our proposed system can effectively calibrate the intrinsic model and extrinsic poses of the omnidirectional camera, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the omnidirectional radiance field reconstruction. To summarize, the main contributions of this work include: We proposed the first system for self-calibrating omnidirectional radiance fields, which jointly optimizes 3D Gaussians, omnidirectional camera poses, and camera models. We provided the derivation of omnidirectional camera pose gradients within the omnidirectional Gaussian splatting procedure, enabling the optimization of noisy camera poses Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 and even learning from scratch. It can also facilitate other applications such as GS-based omnidirectional SLAM. We introduced a novel differentiable omnidirectional camera model that effectively tackles the complex distortion pattern contained in omnidirectional cameras. 2 RELATED WORK Omnidirectional Radiance Field. Neural radiance field (Ne RF) (Mildenhall et al., 2020) has emerged as a powerful neural scene representation for novel view synthesis. Ne RF represents a scene as a neural network with radiance and opacity outputs for each 3D point. Although most existing radiance field approaches (Chen et al., 2022; Barron et al., 2023; Sun et al., 2022; Xu et al., 2022) can synthesize photorealistic novel views by learning from dense perspective image captures, they tend to suffer from inaccurate geometry reconstruction due to the limited field-of-view coverage and sparse view inputs. To achieve an immersive scene touring with six degrees of freedom (6-Do F), Huang et al. (2022) proposes omnidirectional radiance field learning from sparse 360degree images with geometry-adaptive blocks, while some previous works incorporate 360-degree 3D priors for better geometry feature learning (Chen et al., 2023b; Kulkarni et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2024). Ego Ne RF (Choi et al., 2023) employs quasi-uniform angular grids to enhance performance in egocentric scenes captured within a small circular area. The recent 3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) techniques parameterize radiance fields as explicit 3D Gaussians, significantly accelerating rendering and optimization (Kerbl et al., 2023). With the efficient 3D-GS representation, concurrent Omni GS (Li et al., 2024) optimizes 3D Gaussian splats via sparse panorama inputs while 360-GS (Bai et al., 2024) further exploits indoor layout priors for robust structure reconstruction. While panoramas offer a continuous and wide field of view for omnidirectional optimization, all discussed works focus on radiance field reconstruction merely from known camera parameters, which are vulnerable to inaccurate camera modeling. Self-Calibrating Radiance Field. To simplify the training process of radiance fields and alleviate the reliance on pre-computed camera parameters, some works optimize camera poses or learn poses from scratch during scene reconstruction (Wang et al., 2021; Jeong et al., 2021; Lin et al., 2021). Wang et al. (2021) shows that camera pose and intrinsic parameters can be jointly optimized during Ne RF learning for forward-facing scenes. SC-Ne RF (Jeong et al., 2021) additionally learns nonlinear distortion parameters and introduces a camera self-calibration algorithm for generic cameras during Ne RF learning. BARF (Lin et al., 2021) proposes a coarse-to-fine camera registration process from imperfect camera poses for bundle-adjusting Ne RFs by gradually activating higher frequency bands of positional encoding. L2G-Ne RF (Chen et al., 2023a) introduces an effective local-to-global camera registration strategy with an initially flexible pixel-wise alignment and a frame-wise global alignment. No Pe-Ne RF (Bian et al., 2023) employs monocular depth priors for camera estimation with no pose initialization, but it is limited to depth prediction accuracy. For better joint estimation of the scene and camera, Cam P (Park et al., 2023) introduces the camera preconditioning technique, which applies a preconditioning matrix to camera parameters before passing them to the Ne RF model. Recently, SLAM systems (Huang et al., 2024a; Yan et al., 2024; Matsuki et al., 2024; Keetha et al., 2024) started adopting 3D-GS radiance field for efficient simultaneous localization and photorealistic mapping while the camera intrinsic model is calibrated. Fu et al. (2024) relies on monocular depth estimation for jointly optimizing camera poses and 3D Gaussians. Existing self-calibrating methods are devised to optimize the radiance field from perspective images. SC-Omni GS is the first work dealing with self-calibration of omnidirectional radiance fields. Camera Model. A camera model is a camera projection function that establishes a mathematical relationship between 2D images and 3D observation. Typically, camera models can be classified into two groups, including parametric camera models, e.g. (Kannala & Brandt, 2006; Usenko et al., 2018) and generic camera models, e.g. (Swaninathan et al., 2003; Schops et al., 2020). Parametric camera models assume in 3D vision that lens distortion is symmetrical radially and use high-order polynomials to approximate models of real lenses. Conversely, generic camera models exploit a mass of parameters to associate each pixel with a 3D ray and calibrate distortion. Recent neural lens modeling (Xian et al., 2023) employs an invertible neural network (Ardizzone et al., 2018-2022) to model lens distortion while its optimization is memory-consuming. In this paper, we propose a generic camera model tailored for the 360-degree camera. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Figure 2: A schematic overview of SC-Omni GS optimization flow. 3 PRELIMINARY: 3D GAUSSIAN SPLATTING 3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) (Kerbl et al., 2023) represents the scene with a set of 3D Gaussians, of which ith Gaussian is parameterized by 3D position Pi, covariance Σi, opacity σi, and color ci represented by spherical harmonics (SH) coefficients. The 3D Gaussian reconstruction kernel is formulated as r3D(P) = G3D(P Pi) = exp{ 1 2(P Pi)T Σ 1 i (P Pi)}, (1) where P R3 := (X, Y, Z)T denotes the sampling position in the world space. To render an image, 3D Gaussians are transformed from the world space to the camera space {x := (x, y, z)T |x R3} by a viewing transformation matrix T = [R|t], and x = RP + t. 3D Gaussians are then projected onto the image plane {u := (u, v)T |u R2}. The projection function ϕ for a perspective image is described as u = ϕ(x) = fxx/z + cx fyy/z + cy where fx, fy are focal lengths and cx, cy are the principle points of the pinhole camera model. Since this projection process is not affine, the 3D Gaussian reconstruction kernel r3D(P) cannot be directly mapped to 2D. To address this problem, Zwicker et al. (2002) introduced the local affine approximation of the projection function: u = ui + Ji (x xi) = ϕ(RPi + t) + Ji (x RPi t). (3) The Jacobian Ji is defined by the partial derivatives of projection function ϕ at point xi: According to Eq. 1 and 3, the 2D Gaussian reconstruction kernel is thus calculated by r2D(u) = G2D(u ui) = exp{ 1 2(u ui)T (Ji RΣi RT JT i ) 1(u ui)}. (6) The final rendering color C(u) of a pixel u in the image can be computed by volumetric rendering: j=1 (1 αj), αj = σj r2D(u), (7) m=0 SHm i (diri), diri =normalize( Pi ( RT t) ), (8) where N denotes the set of ordered 3D Gaussians affecting the pixel u after splatting onto 2D image, while M is the degree of SH coefficients. SHm i ( ) denotes spherical harmonics functions of the normalized viewing orientation diri. 4 METHODOLOGY: SC-OMNIGS SC-Omni GS is a self-calibrating framework for omnidirectional radiance field reconstruction. It takes multiple 360-degree images without pose information or with noisy pose estimations as input to recover a fine-grained omnidirectional radiance field. We adopt 3D-GS (Kerbl et al., 2023) as the Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 radiance field representation to achieve fast reconstruction and real-time novel view rendering. Similar to 3D-GS, we initialize the 3D Gaussians from coarse points input obtained from Sf M estimation or an omnidirectional depth map. We then jointly optimize 3D Gaussians, the omnidirectional camera model, and poses. The overview of our framework is demonstrated in Figure 2. In this section, we first revisit omnidirectional Gaussian splatting and introduce a differentiable rasterizer that can render omnidirectional images in the equirectangular projection. In addition, we conduct a mathematical analysis of omnidirectional camera pose derivatives within the rasterizer. Furthermore, we propose a novel omnidirectional camera model to rectify input training images. Finally, the joint optimization is performed to minimize weighted spherical photometric loss and anisotropy loss. 4.1 OMNIDIRECTIONAL GAUSSIAN SPLATTING To develop a universal rasterizer, we adopt an idealized spherical camera model to describe the projection relationship of an omnidirectional camera (Li et al., 2024). Rather than splatting 3D Gaussians onto an image plane, we project them onto a unit sphere and subsequently expand the unit sphere to a 2D image in the equirectangular projection. The projection function for an omnidirectional image, denoted as ϕo, is defined as: u = ϕo(x) = f o x arctan2(x, z) + co x f o y arcsin(y/d) + co y 2π arctan2(x, z) + W π arcsin(y/d) + H where arctan2 is the 2-argument arctangent function and d = p x2 + y2 + z2. H and W denote image height and width respectively. According to Eq. 4, the partial derivatives of projection function ϕo at point xi is Jo i , and f o x zi x2 i +z2 i 0 f o x xi x2 i +z2 i f o y xiyi d2 i x2 i +z2 i f o y x2 i +z2 i d2 i f o y ziyi d2 i We substitute Ji in Eq. 6 and obtain the 2D Gaussian reconstruction kernel for omnidirectional Gaussian splitting: ro 2D(u) = Go 2D(u ui) = exp{ 1 2(u ui)T (Jo i RΣi RT Jo i T ) 1(u ui)}. (11) Eventually, the rendering color Co(u) of a pixel u in the omnidirectional image can be computed by: j=1 (1 αo j), αo j = σj ro 2D(u). (12) 4.2 GRADIENTS OF OMNIDIRECTIONAL CAMERA POSE In addition to backpropagating gradients with respect to 3D Gaussians, our differentiable omnidirectional rasterizer also propagates gradients with respect to world-to-camera transformation metrics T = [R|t] for camera pose optimization. To ensure numerical stability and avoid singularities during optimization, we represent and optimize the transformation matrix in a compact and singularity-free form, which is a 7-dimensional vector comprising a rotation quaternion and translation: T = [q|t] = [qw qx qy qz tx ty tz]. By applying the chain rule to the rendering function in Eq. 12, the gradients of camera pose can be decomposed into two primary branches: L c c T and L αo j αo j ro 2D ro 2D T . Since L c and L αo j αo j ro 2D have been previously derivated for 3D Gaussian optimization (Kerbl et al., 2023; Li et al., 2024), we further elaborate unsolved parts subsequently. Part 1: c T , the gradient of color w.r.t. pose [q|t]. The view-dependent color of a 3D Gaussian is obtained from spherical harmonics coefficients as depicted in Eq 8. It is related to its normalized viewing orientation. Hence, c T is equal to c T = c dir dir T = c dir dir Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Figure 3: Differentiable omnidirectional camera model. Part 2: ro 2D T , the gradient of 2D Gaussian w.r.t. pose [q|t]. Camera pose gets involved in the splatting of Gaussian onto 2D omnidirectional images. According to Eq. 9-11, ro 2D T = ro 2D ui ui T , ro 2D Jo i Jo i T , ro 2D R R = ro 2D ui ui xi , ro 2D Jo i Jo i xi + ro 2D R R 4.3 OMNIDIRECTIONAL CAMERA MODEL Omnidirectional cameras, which typically consist of at least two fisheye lenses, capture 360-degree images through image stitching. However, factory calibration prioritizes seamless stitching over rectifying distortion. As such, stitched omnidirectional images inherently retain distortion from the original camera lenses and deviate from ideal spherical camera models. Unfortunately, there is a lack of well-established camera models capable of accurately representing omnidirectional camera distortion, which inevitably compromises 3D reconstruction quality. To address this limitation, we propose the first generic omnidirectional camera model that learns complex distorting patterns through differentiable optimization. Our omnidirectional camera model comprises a frozen unit sphere and trainable focal length coefficient ft and angle distortion coefficients, as illustrated in Figure 3. For model initialization, we create a spherical grid S RH W 3 and set the corresponding angle distortion coefficients D with the same dimension to zeros. The camera ray distortion is then estimated by the Hadamard product of the spherical grid and learned angle distortion coefficients. This approach is more stable than directly learning camera ray distortion. Consequently, the omnidirectional camera model Θ is defined as: Θ := S ft + S D. (15) Our differentiable camera model is decoupled from the rasterization pipeline, ensuring that it does not compromise the efficiency of the rendering process. By leveraging the learned camera model parameters Θ, we can extract a distortion-free omnidirectional image Io from the input image using bicubic grid sampling. Please refer to Algorithm 1 for details. The extracted images Io are then utilized to compute the total loss against the rendered images Ir. 4.4 JOINT OPTIMIZATION The optimization in terms of 3D Gaussian, camera pose T , and camera model Θ is performed by minimizing the photometric loss, comprising the mean absolute error (MAE) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) loss. However, the equirectangular image projection is not conformal, as the region deformation increases along parallels towards poles. In other words, similar 3D spatial information would occupy more pixels when projected to the top and bottom areas of the 2D image. To ensure spatially equivalent optimization, we introduce a weighted spherical photometric loss, which is defined as: Lwsp(Ir, Io) = 1 |I| X n (1 λ) ˆIr ˆIo 1 + λ(1 SSIM( ˆIr, ˆIo)) o , (16) ˆI = w I, w(u) = cos (v co y + 0.5)/f o y (17) Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 where λ is a hyperparameter, I represents a set of image pixels, and w( ) is the spherical weights (Sun et al., 2017) used to ensure a spherically uniform sample. In addition, we leverage an anisotropy regularizer to constrain the ratio between the major and minor axis lengths of 3D Gaussians, thereby preventing them from degenerating into filamentous kernels. The anisotropy regularizer is formulated as: Laniso = 1 |N | X n max( max(si) min(si) , γ) γ o , (18) where si is the scaling of 3D Gaussians (Kerbl et al., 2023) and γ is the ratio threshold. Overall, the joint optimization objective is: L = Lwsp + Laniso. (19) 5 EXPERIMENTS 5.1 EXPERIMENT SETUP Implementation Detail. Our SC-Omni GS implementation is built on Pytorch and CUDA. We utilize Adam optimizer to update trainable parameters. The hyperparameters for 3D Gaussians optimization are set according to the default settings of 3D-GS (Kerbl et al., 2023), with λ = 0.2 and a total of 30,000 optimization iterations. We set the ratio threshold γ to 10. The omnidirectional camera model is shared across all views on individual scene. Moreover, we set the learning rate of the camera model Θ to 1e-4 and activate the angle distortion coefficients D using the Tanh function. For simplicity, we fix ft to 1. The initial learning rates for each camera quaternion q and translation t are set to 0.01, with exponential decay to 1.6e-4 and 6e-3, respectively, in 100 steps per camera. When calibrating from scratch, we increase the initial learning rate of t to 0.1. Baselines. For comparison, we select BARF (Lin et al., 2021), L2G-Ne RF (Chen et al., 2023a) and Cam P (Park et al., 2023) as SOTA radiance field calibration baselines trained with training cameras initialized with preset perturbations or from scratch with no pose prior. For reference, we also run 3D-GS (Kerbl et al., 2023) and Omni GS (Li et al., 2024) as non-calibration SOTA baselines. However, apart from Omni GS, other baselines devised for perspective images are not compatible with omnidirectional images as input. To accommodate baselines for fair comparisons, we adopted two practices: 1) We converted each omnidirectional image into a cube map consisting of six perspective images, and then we took the cube maps as input to run the open-source systems with default configurations. 2) Following 360Roam (Huang et al., 2022), we replaced the ray sampling functions of Ne RF-based methods (BARF, L2G-Ne RF, Cam P) with omnidirectional ray sampling to support omnidirectional image training and rendering. Additionally, since point cloud initialization is demanded by 3D-GS based methods, we conducted experiments using different initialization strategies to further verify our system s robustness and flexibility. Datasets. We evaluated SG-Omni GS against several SOTA models on datasets of 360-degree images, including eight real-world multi-room scenes from 360Roam dataset (Huang et al., 2022) each with on average 110 training views and 37 test views, and three synthetic single-room scenes from Omni Blender dataset (Choi et al., 2023) each with 25 training views and 25 test views. 360Roam dataset utilizes camera poses estimated by Sf M as ground truth and also provides Sf M sparse point cloud. Omni Blender dataset provides noise-free camera poses and depth maps. All methods were run on a desktop computer with an RTX 3090 GPU. We use metrics PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS for evaluating novel view synthesis. Please refer to Appendix C for details on camera perturbations and experimental setup. 5.2 EVALUATION ON SINGLE-ROOM SYNTHETIC DATASET We conducted experiments on three synthetic scenes from Omni Blender (Choi et al., 2023), namely Barbershop, Classroom, and Flat. As depicted in Table 1, we configured four settings of radiance field calibration, Camera poses with perturbation and 3D Gaussians initialized from a single rendering depth map. No camera poses prior but 3D Gaussians initialized from a single rendering depth map. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Table 1: Quantitative comparisons on synthetic dataset Omni Blender. Checked Perturb indicates perturbed training camera poses for training, indicates training from scratch. 3D-GS based methods are marked with different point cloud initializations: random sampling (random), projection from an estimated mono-depth (est. depth), or from a rendered mono-depth (render depth). Methods marked with superscript are modified via omnidirectional sampling. We mark the best two results in each experiment group with first and second . On Omni Blender Perturb Barbershop Classroom Flat Barbershop Classroom Flat PSNR SSIM LPIPS PSNR SSIM LPIPS PSNR SSIM LPIPS PSNR SSIM LPIPS PSNR SSIM LPIPS PSNR SSIM LPIPS 3D-GS (render depth) 31.308 0.922 0.093 26.489 0.782 0.248 30.274 0.882 0.149 30.526 0.912 0.101 25.794 0.766 0.262 28.357 0.869 0.161 Omni GS (render depth) 37.270 0.971 0.040 32.565 0.857 0.161 34.484 0.928 0.081 35.485 0.965 0.043 31.552 0.846 0.164 33.477 0.922 0.083 Omni GS (render depth) 24.155 0.830 0.268 20.175 0.699 0.399 22.904 0.813 0.285 17.717 0.595 0.446 16.917 0.561 0.484 18.768 0.700 0.372 BARF 28.796 0.851 0.242 25.854 0.741 0.309 28.072 0.823 0.252 23.477 0.752 0.260 25.705 0.739 0.309 22.235 0.759 0.294 BARF 30.066 0.869 0.191 29.204 0.768 0.261 31.003 0.868 0.143 29.739 0.866 0.191 28.865 0.765 0.263 30.417 0.649 0.144 L2G-Ne RF 29.023 0.858 0.222 25.585 0.729 0.325 27.970 0.825 0.243 28.749 0.856 0.224 18.064 0.597 0.408 18.937 0.713 0.353 L2G-Ne RF 30.083 0.870 0.188 29.140 0.765 0.267 31.020 0.866 0.145 29.705 0.867 0.189 28.823 0.762 0.268 30.576 0.863 0.146 Cam P 29.916 0.888 0.185 26.774 0.813 0.181 29.440 0.864 0.179 17.770 0.605 0.449 16.258 0.553 0.558 18.383 0.699 0.380 Cam P 30.865 0.905 0.162 30.749 0.884 0.108 29.930 0.883 0.162 17.892 0.688 0.391 15.948 0.544 0.549 17.892 0.688 0.391 Ours (random) 36.255 0.960 0.066 32.764 0.848 0.185 34.476 0.918 0.094 34.719 0.957 0.062 30.659 0.827 0.189 33.344 0.912 0.096 Ours (est. depth) 36.578 0.964 0.051 33.066 0.859 0.149 33.256 0.922 0.023 34.404 0.952 0.055 30.122 0.816 0.156 31.472 0.901 0.084 Ours (render depth) 37.612 0.978 0.028 33.075 0.875 0.127 35.240 0.941 0.063 35.612 0.972 0.030 31.151 0.853 0.132 34.129 0.935 0.065 Omni GS (render depth) 18.507 0.689 0.542 17.160 0.622 0.555 18.758 0.747 0.395 18.431 0.678 0.542 17.120 0.611 0.556 18.728 0.744 0.395 BARF 27.871 0.823 0.296 24.752 0.700 0.360 27.621 0.814 0.269 18.299 0.631 0.410 16.794 0.564 0.455 20.645 0.735 0.329 BARF 27.598 0.807 0.303 25.869 0.706 0.360 28.410 0.820 0.231 27.508 0.805 0.303 25.710 0.703 0.360 28.140 0.818 0.231 L2G-Ne RF 28.300 0.840 0.255 25.623 0.731 0.324 27.911 0.820 0.258 20.165 0.679 0.317 19.461 0.621 0.377 18.921 0.714 0.359 L2G-Ne RF 28.488 0.834 0.256 26.802 0.719 0.341 29.152 0.832 0.209 28.198 0.830 0.256 26.300 0.714 0.342 28.717 0.828 0.211 Cam P 27.316 0.834 0.273 25.738 0.767 0.255 30.202 0.868 0.163 17.753 0.605 0.389 15.420 0.526 0.493 18.342 0.711 0.306 Cam P 27.818 0.839 0.241 26.710 0.790 0.211 32.169 0.891 0.116 16.807 0.585 0.413 14.664 0.501 0.490 27.982 0.856 0.124 Ours (random) 35.196 0.953 0.075 31.082 0.833 0.203 32.614 0.903 0.111 33.422 0.944 0.084 28.971 0.806 0.214 31.673 0.895 0.114 Ours (est. depth) 35.343 0.952 0.082 32.294 0.851 0.166 32.924 0.915 0.088 33.401 0.940 0.087 29.385 0.801 0.195 31.278 0.897 0.094 Ours (render depth) 35.601 0.961 0.060 30.815 0.846 0.173 33.064 0.910 0.110 34.368 0.956 0.063 30.212 0.837 0.176 32.424 0.906 0.112 No camera poses prior but 3D Gaussians initialized from a single estimated depth map. No camera poses prior and random 3D Gaussians initialization. In the first setting, we perturbed the training camera poses using the same preset noises, indicated by under the Perturb column in Table 1. Omni GS is the SOTA method in non-calibration omnidirectional radiance field reconstruction. When the input camera poses contain noticeable perturbance, Omni GS suffers significant performance degradation and struggles to synthesize clear novel views. BARF and L2G-Ne RF exhibit acceptable performance with perturbed training cameras. After modifying ray sampling functions, we can effectively improve Ne RF-based methods performance, proving the necessity of properly treating omnidirectional images as a whole. However, we cannot apply a similar modification to 3D-GS based methods. It is non-trivial to achieve omnidirectional radiance field bundle adjustment, while our SC-Omni GS achieves dominant performance, on par with Omni GS trained with ground-truth cameras. Additionally, we initialized all training cameras at the origin, enabling training the models from scratch without pose priors. This is denoted by a under the Perturb column in Table 1. In comparison to all baselines, our SC-Omni GS demonstrates stable and excellent performance. To verify SC-Omni GS flexibility and robustness, we utilized an omnidirectional monocular depth estimation method, e.g. EGformer (Yun et al., 2023), to estimate a depth map of the first image for 3D Gaussians initialization without the necessity of a known camera pose. Despite a slight decrease in rendering quality, the results demonstrate that our method still exhibits significant performance improvements compared to baseline methods. Finally, rather than using the rendered or estimated geometry as the starting point, we randomly sampled 300k points with random colors and positions as the initial 3D Gaussians to run our method. Our method is able to effectively optimize the scene representation, displaying a low sensitivity to initial values. Figures 4a and 4b display visual comparisons among calibration methods trained from scratch. Based on the conventional pinhole camera model, inaccurate camera optimization for individual perspective views leads to disconnected faces of a cube map, such as red insets of BARF and L2GNe RF. In contrast, our omnidirectional camera model assists in optimizing cameras with concern about the holistic field of view, achieving a continuous synthesis. 5.3 EVALUATION ON MULTI-ROOM REAL-WORLD DATASET In real-world scenarios, we studied three situations of SC-Omni GS and reported the average metric scores across scenes in Table 2: Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Ground truth (a) Barbershop (b) Classroom (c) Canteen (d) Innovation Figure 4: Qualitative comparisons of 360-degree novel views among calibration methods. Our results outperform in both rendering quality and camera accuracy. indicates training from scratch. Table 2: Quantitative comparisons on real-world dataset 360Roam. Point Init indicates the way of point cloud initialization for 3D-GS based methods, checked Perturb indicates perturbed camera poses as inputs, train and test indicate training and test views, respectively. Methods marked with superscript are modified via omnidirectional sampling. We mark the best two results in each experiment group with first and second . On 360Roam Perturb Point Init train test PSNR SSIM LPIPS PSNR SSIM LPIPS 3D-GS (Kerbl et al., 2023) Sf M 23.943 0.744 0.223 20.791 0.684 0.261 Omni GS (Li et al., 2024) Sf M 28.517 0.861 0.137 24.212 0.768 0.176 SC-Omni GS (Ours) Sf M 29.495 0.877 0.141 25.297 0.803 0.180 Omni GS (Li et al., 2024) Sf M 22.111 0.705 0.334 15.619 0.455 0.489 BARF (Lin et al., 2021) N/A 21.699 0.594 0.465 20.200 0.572 0.481 BARF (Lin et al., 2021) N/A 22.136 0.575 0.492 20.484 0.546 0.510 L2G-Ne RF (Chen et al., 2023a) N/A 21.797 0.598 0.460 20.507 0.576 0.473 L2G-Ne RF (Chen et al., 2023a) N/A 22.581 0.590 0.462 20.023 0.542 0.495 Cam P (Park et al., 2023) N/A 24.592 0.735 0.264 14.253 0.438 0.573 Cam P (Park et al., 2023) N/A 26.134 0.786 0.239 13.659 0.437 0.622 SC-Omni GS (Ours) Random 28.562 0.852 0.175 24.343 0.770 0.224 SC-Omni GS (Ours) Sf M 29.232 0.872 0.147 24.910 0.790 0.188 Sf M camera poses without perturbation and 3D Gaussians initialized from Sf M point clouds. Sf M camera poses with perturbation and 3D Gaussians initialized from Sf M point clouds. Sf M camera poses with perturbation and random 3D Gaussians initialization. Real-world omnidirectional images captured by 360-degree cameras inherit the distortion from each lens and result in a complex distortion pattern. However, most methods leverage an ideal spherical camera model to describe omnidirectional projection while overlooking the impact of 360-degree camera distortion. With our proposed calibration approach, SC-Omni GS can further optimize camera parameters in particular the camera intrinsic model, eventually outperforming the non-calibration method Omni GS trained with Sf M cameras, as demonstrated in the first block of Table 2. Under the situation of camera perturbation, SC-Omni GS demonstrates consistent performance across both training and test views, no matter how 3D Gaussians are initialized. As visualized in Figure 4, our SC-Omni GS also dominates qualitative performance in omnidirectional scenarios. BARF and L2G-Ne RF tend to synthesize low-quality and blurry images, while Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 (a) Synthetic scene Barbershop. (b) Real-world scene Lab. Figure 5: Performance with different camera perturbations (PSNR ). Zoom in for details. Table 3: Ablation study on scene Center of 360Roam, in terms of the optimization of camera pose, camera model, or both. Perturb indicates perturbed camera poses, train and test indicate training and test views, respectively. We mark the best two results with first and second . Calibration w/o Perturb w/ Perturb train test train test PSNR SSIM LPIPS PSNR SSIM LPIPS PSNR SSIM LPIPS PSNR SSIM LPIPS none 28.728 0.848 0.170 24.264 0.763 0.213 22.740 0.717 0.372 15.597 0.510 0.553 +camera model 30.230 0.877 0.153 25.123 0.795 0.195 22.743 0.730 0.408 15.702 0.543 0.568 +pose 28.334 0.837 0.191 24.906 0.781 0.224 28.130 0.834 0.198 24.739 0.777 0.233 +camera model+pose 30.035 0.872 0.169 25.802 0.813 0.203 29.706 0.867 0.177 25.304 0.799 0.220 Cam P generates floating fuzzy artifacts, albeit with some high-frequency details. Please refer to Appendix D for more quantitative and qualitative comparison results. 5.4 ROBUSTNESS AND ANALYSIS OF SC-OMNIGS Robustness. To further assess the robustness of our method against varying levels of camera perturbation, we conducted experiments using the same learning rate with increasing scales of translation and rotation noise applied to the training cameras. In Figure 5, we visualize the performance trend depicting the impact of increasing noise scales on the synthetic scene Barbershop and the realworld scene Lab. In the left charts of Figures 5a and 5b, we fixed the default rotation noise scale and varied translation noise scales, while the right charts represent variable rotation noise scale and fixed translation noise scale. Our camera calibration demonstrates greater robustness to translation errors with only minor degradation compared to rotation errors. Furthermore, when compared to other calibration baselines (see Barbershop in Table 1), SC-Omni GS consistently outperforms them with most increased rotation noise scales. Ablation study. As a novel self-calibrating omnidirectional radiance fields method, SC-Omni GS proposed two main components, i.e. a generic omnidirectional camera model and camera pose optimization. To validate the effectiveness of our camera calibration, we conducted ablation studies on a real scene Center, with and without perturbation to training cameras. The results are presented in Table 3. When the input camera poses are estimated by Sf M without perturbation, we can slightly increase the quality of radiance field reconstruction by camera pose refinement, although its performance gain is not higher than adding an omnidirectional camera model. When trained with pose perturbation, our full model, incorporating both camera model and pose optimization, consistently achieves improvement in both training and test view synthesis. 6 CONCLUSION This paper introduces SC-Omni GS, the first self-calibrating omnidirectional Gaussian splatting system that enables swift and accurate reconstruction of omnidirectional radiance fields. With the differentiable omnidirectional camera model and Gaussian splatting procedure, our approach jointly optimizes 3D Gaussians, omnidirectional camera poses and camera model, leading to robust camera optimization and enhanced reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of SC-Omni GS in recovering high-quality omnidirectional radiance fields, either with noisy poses or without pose prior. Our work offers an efficient and precise omnidirectional radiance field reconstruction for potential applications in virtual reality, robotics, and autonomous navigation. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research project is partially supported by the Innovation and Technology Support Programme of the Innovation and Technology Fund (Ref: ITS/319/22FP). Lynton Ardizzone, Till Bungert, Felix Draxler, Ullrich K othe, Jakob Kruse, Robert Schmier, and Peter Sorrenson. Framework for Easily Invertible Architectures (Fr EIA), 2018-2022. URL https://github.com/vislearn/Fr EIA. Jiayang Bai, Letian Huang, Jie Guo, Wen Gong, Yuanqi Li, and Yanwen Guo. 360-gs: Layoutguided panoramic gaussian splatting for indoor roaming. ar Xiv preprint ar Xiv:2402.00763, 2024. Jonathan T Barron, Ben Mildenhall, Matthew Tancik, Peter Hedman, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, and Pratul P Srinivasan. Mip-nerf: A multiscale representation for anti-aliasing neural radiance fields. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 5855 5864, 2021. Jonathan T Barron, Ben Mildenhall, Dor Verbin, Pratul P Srinivasan, and Peter Hedman. Mip-nerf 360: Unbounded anti-aliased neural radiance fields. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 5470 5479, 2022. Jonathan T. Barron, Ben Mildenhall, Dor Verbin, Pratul P. Srinivasan, and Peter Hedman. Zip-nerf: Anti-aliased grid-based neural radiance fields. ICCV, 2023. Wenjing Bian, Zirui Wang, Kejie Li, Jia-Wang Bian, and Victor Adrian Prisacariu. Nope-nerf: Optimising neural radiance field with no pose prior. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 4160 4169, 2023. Anpei Chen, Zexiang Xu, Andreas Geiger, Jingyi Yu, and Hao Su. Tensorf: Tensorial radiance fields. In Computer Vision ECCV 2022: 17th European Conference, Tel Aviv, Israel, October 23 27, 2022, Proceedings, Part XXXII, pp. 333 350. Springer, 2022. Yue Chen, Xingyu Chen, Xuan Wang, Qi Zhang, Yu Guo, Ying Shan, and Fei Wang. Local-toglobal registration for bundle-adjusting neural radiance fields. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 8264 8273, 2023a. Zheng Chen, Yan-Pei Cao, Yuan-Chen Guo, Chen Wang, Ying Shan, and Song-Hai Zhang. Panogrf: Generalizable spherical radiance fields for wide-baseline panoramas. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36, 2023b. Changwoon Choi, Sang Min Kim, and Young Min Kim. Balanced spherical grid for egocentric view synthesis. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 16590 16599, 2023. Sara Fridovich-Keil, Alex Yu, Matthew Tancik, Qinhong Chen, Benjamin Recht, and Angjoo Kanazawa. Plenoxels: Radiance fields without neural networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 5501 5510, 2022. Yang Fu, Sifei Liu, Amey Kulkarni, Jan Kautz, Alexei A Efros, and Xiaolong Wang. Colmap-free 3d gaussian splatting. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 2024. Huajian Huang and Sai-Kit Yeung. 360vo: Visual odometry using a single 360 camera. In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE, 2022. Huajian Huang, Yingshu Chen, Tianjia Zhang, and Sai-Kit Yeung. 360roam: Real-time indoor roaming using geometry-aware 360 radiance fields. ar Xiv preprint ar Xiv:2208.02705, 2022. Huajian Huang, Longwei Li, Cheng Hui, and Sai-Kit Yeung. Photo-slam: Real-time simultaneous localization and photorealistic mapping for monocular, stereo, and rgb-d cameras. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2024a. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Huajian Huang, Changkun Liu, Yipeng Zhu, Hui Cheng, Tristan Braud, and Sai-Kit Yeung. 360loc: A dataset and benchmark for omnidirectional visual localization with cross-device queries, 2024b. Yoonwoo Jeong, Seokjun Ahn, Christopher Choy, Anima Anandkumar, Minsu Cho, and Jaesik Park. Self-calibrating neural radiance fields. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 5846 5854, 2021. Juho Kannala and Sami S Brandt. A generic camera model and calibration method for conventional, wide-angle, and fish-eye lenses. IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 28(8):1335 1340, 2006. Nikhil Keetha, Jay Karhade, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Gengshan Yang, Sebastian Scherer, Deva Ramanan, and Jonathon Luiten. Splatam: Splat, track & map 3d gaussians for dense rgb-d slam. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2024. Bernhard Kerbl, Georgios Kopanas, Thomas Leimk uhler, and George Drettakis. 3d gaussian splatting for real-time radiance field rendering. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 42(4):1 14, 2023. Shreyas Kulkarni, Peng Yin, and Sebastian Scherer. 360fusionnerf: Panoramic neural radiance fields with joint guidance. In 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 7202 7209. IEEE, 2023. Longwei Li, Huajian Huang, Sai-Kit Yeung, and Hui Cheng. Omnigs: Omnidirectional gaussian splatting for fast radiance field reconstruction using omnidirectional images. ar Xiv preprint ar Xiv:2404.03202, 2024. Chen-Hsuan Lin, Wei-Chiu Ma, Antonio Torralba, and Simon Lucey. Barf: Bundle-adjusting neural radiance fields. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 5741 5751, 2021. Hidenobu Matsuki, Riku Murai, Paul H. J. Kelly, and Andrew J. Davison. Gaussian Splatting SLAM. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2024. Ben Mildenhall, Pratul P Srinivasan, Matthew Tancik, Jonathan T Barron, Ravi Ramamoorthi, and Ren Ng. Nerf: Representing scenes as neural radiance fields for view synthesis. In European conference on computer vision, pp. 405 421. Springer, 2020. Pierre Moulon, Pascal Monasse, and Renaud Marlet. Global fusion of relative motions for robust, accurate and scalable structure from motion. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 3248 3255, 2013. Thomas M uller, Alex Evans, Christoph Schied, and Alexander Keller. Instant neural graphics primitives with a multiresolution hash encoding. ACM Trans. Graph., pp. 102:1 102:15, 2022. doi: 10.1145/3528223.3530127. Keunhong Park, Philipp Henzler, Ben Mildenhall, Jonathan T Barron, and Ricardo Martin-Brualla. Camp: Camera preconditioning for neural radiance fields. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 42(6):1 11, 2023. Thomas Schops, Viktor Larsson, Marc Pollefeys, and Torsten Sattler. Why having 10,000 parameters in your camera model is better than twelve. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 2535 2544, 2020. Cheng Sun, Min Sun, and Hwann-Tzong Chen. Direct voxel grid optimization: Super-fast convergence for radiance fields reconstruction. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 5459 5469, 2022. Yule Sun, Ang Lu, and Lu Yu. Weighted-to-spherically-uniform quality evaluation for omnidirectional video. IEEE signal processing letters, 24(9):1408 1412, 2017. Rahul Swaninathan, Michael D Grossberg, and Shree K Nayar. A perspective on distortions. In 2003 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2003. Proceedings., volume 2, pp. II 594. IEEE, 2003. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Vladyslav Usenko, Nikolaus Demmel, and Daniel Cremers. The double sphere camera model. In 2018 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), pp. 552 560. IEEE, 2018. Guangcong Wang, Peng Wang, Zhaoxi Chen, Wenping Wang, Chen Change Loy, and Ziwei Liu. Perf: Panoramic neural radiance field from a single panorama. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2024. Zirui Wang, Shangzhe Wu, Weidi Xie, Min Chen, and Victor Adrian Prisacariu. Nerf : Neural radiance fields without known camera parameters. ar Xiv preprint ar Xiv:2102.07064, 2021. Wenqi Xian, Aljaˇz Boˇziˇc, Noah Snavely, and Christoph Lassner. Neural lens modeling. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 8435 8445, 2023. Qiangeng Xu, Zexiang Xu, Julien Philip, Sai Bi, Zhixin Shu, Kalyan Sunkavalli, and Ulrich Neumann. Point-nerf: Point-based neural radiance fields. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, pp. 5438 5448, 2022. Chi Yan, Delin Qu, Dan Xu, Bin Zhao, Zhigang Wang, Dong Wang, and Xuelong Li. Gs-slam: Dense visual slam with 3d gaussian splatting. In CVPR, 2024. Ilwi Yun, Chanyong Shin, Hyunku Lee, Hyuk-Jae Lee, and Chae Eun Rhee. Egformer: Equirectangular geometry-biased transformer for 360 depth estimation. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 6101 6112, 2023. Kai Zhang, Gernot Riegler, Noah Snavely, and Vladlen Koltun. Nerf++: Analyzing and improving neural radiance fields, 2020. Matthias Zwicker, Hanspeter Pfister, Jeroen Van Baar, and Markus Gross. Ewa splatting. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 8(3):223 238, 2002. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 A SOCIETAL IMPACTS This research explored the efficient and robust self-calibrating omnidirectional radiance field for large omnidirectional scenarios, experimenting with real-world data captured with the consumergrade 360-degree camera and synthetic data. It has broad potential impacts and applications in the real world. For example, it supports real-time photorealistic rendering for virtual environments, which enhances virtual immersiveness and enables mixed-reality production. In addition, it can be incorporated into SLAM techniques to upgrade localization robustness. B LIMITATION. When confronted with challenging omnidirectional scenes, i.e., multi-room-level scenes with sparse discrete views, training from scratch is a challenging task without the assistance of a typical Sf M pipeline. We conducted an additional training from scratch experiment using the 360Roam dataset. All self-calibration methods fail to learn radiance fields without any pose priors while our SCOmni GS is no exception. To address these issues, integrating SC-Omni GS into an omnidirectional SLAM framework is a promising direction, which can be a future work. C EXPERIMENT DETAILS C.1 PSEUDO-CODE OF DIFFERENTIABLE OMNIDIRECTIONAL CAMERA MODEL Algorithm 1 illustrates the backpropagation process and the usage of the proposed generic camera model. Algorithm 1: Differentiable Omnidirectional Camera Model Input: input image I /* Initialization */ H, W, C image dimension of I; u image pixel coordinates; S ϕ (u); // project UV back to camera space ft 1; // focal length coefficient D initialize as zeros in in dimension (H, W, 3); D enable gradients; // learnable angle distortion coefficients /* Image Undistortion */ D Tanh(D) ; // apply activation function ˆS S ft + S D; // Eq. 15 ˆu ϕ(ˆS); // undistorted UV coordinates Output undistorted image Io grid sample(I, ˆu); // bicubic grid sample D backpropagate and update via total loss L; C.2 DATASETS 360Roam. 360Roam (Huang et al., 2022) provides 360-degree captured images by a consumergrade 360-degree camera for indoor scenes with multiple rooms, and corresponding initial sparse point clouds from Sf M. We selected eight scenes with relatively large scales for evaluation, including Bar, Base, Cafe, Canteen Center, Innovation, Lab, and Library. All data are under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Omni Blender. Omni Blender (Choi et al., 2023) contains multi-view 360-degree images rendered from Blender synthetic single indoor scenes under MIT License. It provides ground-truth camera Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 parameters, and we additionally rendered a ground-truth depth map of each scene to initialize a sparse point cloud for 3D-GS based methods. The synthetic Blender scene Classroom is under CC0 license, Barbershop and Flat are under CC-BY 4.0 license. All original models can be downloaded in https://www.blender.org/ download/demo-files/. C.3 PERTURBATION DETAILS In comparison experiments in Sec. 5.3 and 5.2, we add translation noise to Sf M or ground-truth camera translation, and multiply rotation by rotation noise. Specifically, we set translation perturbation noise Tnoise = αTscale inv r, where α is random samples from a uniform distribution over [ 1, 1), default Tscale = 0.5, and inv r is the inverse of maximum radius of camera positions for scale normalization. We set rotation perturbation noise Rnoise = βRscale, where β is normalized rotation direction with dimensional values randomly sampled from a normal distribution over the angle range [ 1 , 1 ), and default Rscale = 0.5. Finally, we get preset perturbed translation ˆT and rotation ˆR: ˆT = T + Tnoise, ˆR = R Rnoise. In Sec. 5.4 for robustness measurement, we fixed rotation noise scale Rscale = 0.5 and changed translation noise scale with Tscale [0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3], and also fixed translation with noise scale Tscale = 0.5 and changed rotation noise scale with Rscale [0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. C.4 BASELINES We trained experimental models by all baselines, i.e., 3D-GS (Kerbl et al., 2023), Omni GS (Li et al., 2024), BARF (Lin et al., 2021), L2G-Ne RF (Chen et al., 2023a), Cam P (Park et al., 2023), using their official published source codes and default training configurations. The baseline authors hold all the ownership rights on their software. By default, we convert each 360-degree image in Appendix C.2 into a cube map with six nonoverlapped 480 480 perspective images and re-computed six camera parameters. BARF, L2GNe RF and Cam P trained scenes using converted perspective training and test images. In particular, we increase training iterations of 3D-GS to six fold, i.e., 180,000 iterations for each scene for a fair comparison. In addition, we modified the calibration baselines, i.e., BARF, L2G-Ne RF and Cam P, by replacing original perspective ray sampling with omnidirectional ray sampling for training and rendering. These modified baselines, Omni GS and our SC-Omni GS trained scenes using resolution 760 1520 for 360Roam dataset and 1000 2000 for Omni Blender dataset. C.5 RUNTIME Table 4 reports the quantitative comparisons of training time and inference speed among different methods. On average, for a scene with a Ge Force RTX 3090 GPU, BARF trains for over 2 days, L2G-Ne RF and Cam P for half a day, 3D-GS (six-fold iterations), Omni GS and our SC-Omni GS within 30 minutes. It is noted that SC-Omni GS does not increase much training time with camera self-calibration compared to Omni GS without camera calibration, meanwhile SC-Omni GS supports real-time rendering. D MORE EXPERIMENT RESULTS D.1 ADDITIONAL ABLATION STUDY Considering the characteristic of the omnidirectional image, we introduce a weighted spherical photometric loss Lwsp as defined in Eq. 16 for spatially equivalent optimization. Furthermore, we observe that noisy camera poses can lead to the generation of numerous incorrect 3D Gaussians at the beginning of optimization, making it challenging to filter them out during optimization. To address this, we re-initialize the 3D Gaussian with the input coarse points twice, at the 2000th and Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Method Training time Rendering speed for one panorama (FPS) BARF > 2 days < 0.05 L2G-Ne RF > 12 hours < 0.05 Cam P > 12 hours < 0.2 3D-GS 30 mins > 60 Omni GS 30 mins > 60 SC-Omni GS 30 mins > 60 Table 4: Runtime comparison for methods running on one Ge Force RTX 3090 GPU. Table 5: Ablation study. Re-init indicates re-initialization of 3D Gaussians; w/o Lwsp means we disable the spherical weight and calculate classical photometric loss for optimization; Perturb indicates perturbation; indicates training from scratch without pose priors. We mark the best two results with first and second . Classroom Perturb PSNR SSIM LPIPS w/o Re-init 29.183 0.823 0.193 w/o Lwsp 28.225 0.811 0.192 Ours 30.212 0.837 0.176 4000th iterations. To further verify the effect of the weighted spherical photometric loss and calibration strategy, we conducted additional experiments on Classroom as an ablation study. The test view results are reported in Table 5 and Figure 6. D.2 MORE QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE COMPARISONS We report the complete image quantitative evaluation results on 360Roam dataset in Table 6, and the additional camera pose optimization comparisons in individual scenes in Table 7. Under different scenes and different point cloud initializations, SC-Omni GS outperforms other calibration baselines achieving robust camera calibration capability. Figures 7-8 supplement some qualitative rendering and depth comparisons among adapted calibration baselines with omnidirectional sampling in the scenes same as Figure 4 in the main manuscript. We should intuitively notice that baselines with omnidirectional sampling render continuous 360degree views, while our SC-Omni GS still gains the best rendering fidelity and most accurately calibrated cameras. Furthermore, Figures 9-12 visualize more comparison results of novel 360-degree and perspective views among calibration baselines. (a) Ground truth (b) w/o Lwsp (c) Ours Figure 6: Ablation study of weighted spherical photometric loss Lwsp. Without using Lwsp, the estimated poses of some cameras suffer obvious errors leading to performance degradation in novel view synthesis. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Table 6: The complete image quantitative evaluation results on real-world dataset 360Roam. Checked Perturb indicates perturbed camera poses as inputs, Point Init indicates the way of point cloud initialization for 3D-GS based methods, train and test indicate training and test views, respectively. Methods marked with superscript are modified via omnidirectional sampling. On 360Roam 3D-GS Omni GS SC-Omni GS BARF L2G-Ne RF Cam P train test train test train test train test train test train test Perturb Point Init Sf M Sf M Sf M N/A N/A N/A Bar PSNR 20.983 18.764 24.511 21.567 25.653 22.556 19.047 18.020 19.089 18.333 22.181 13.534 SSIM 0.734 0.673 0.849 0.760 0.862 0.783 0.543 0.523 0.547 0.533 0.736 0.388 LPIPS 0.235 0.268 0.155 0.191 0.158 0.200 0.528 0.538 0.518 0.527 0.283 0.556 Base PSNR 23.677 20.764 28.914 24.254 30.070 25.504 20.409 19.638 20.582 19.991 23.874 13.402 SSIM 0.733 0.681 0.876 0.768 0.897 0.816 0.506 0.499 0.511 0.505 0.674 0.372 LPIPS 0.206 0.233 0.101 0.135 0.098 0.133 0.555 0.562 0.544 0.549 0.319 0.632 Cafe PSNR 24.715 19.428 28.846 24.315 29.283 24.838 22.020 19.440 22.198 20.506 25.086 14.251 SSIM 0.788 0.712 0.902 0.803 0.905 0.813 0.627 0.590 0.637 0.608 0.780 0.448 LPIPS 0.171 0.214 0.087 0.128 0.108 0.161 0.452 0.474 0.440 0.452 0.229 0.579 Canteen PSNR 23.211 19.077 27.318 21.632 27.335 22.159 21.103 18.558 21.116 18.476 24.360 12.861 SSIM 0.733 0.631 0.849 0.712 0.838 0.734 0.591 0.546 0.592 0.540 0.761 0.426 LPIPS 0.253 0.330 0.168 0.236 0.204 0.263 0.483 0.507 0.480 0.505 0.225 0.595 Center PSNR 24.677 21.801 28.728 24.264 30.035 25.802 21.641 18.870 21.953 19.468 25.098 14.574 SSIM 0.754 0.696 0.848 0.763 0.872 0.813 0.598 0.559 0.609 0.564 0.737 0.486 LPIPS 0.239 0.282 0.170 0.213 0.169 0.203 0.489 0.524 0.475 0.507 0.288 0.607 Innovation PSNR 24.258 22.062 28.980 25.201 30.554 26.390 21.964 21.357 22.021 21.525 24.518 14.389 SSIM 0.712 0.677 0.858 0.771 0.898 0.819 0.573 0.568 0.574 0.570 0.687 0.424 LPIPS 0.250 0.269 0.137 0.164 0.120 0.148 0.440 0.445 0.438 0.440 0.308 0.558 Lab PSNR 24.924 22.003 31.651 27.325 32.890 28.875 23.614 22.889 23.624 22.873 25.840 15.565 SSIM 0.824 0.785 0.926 0.869 0.939 0.898 0.725 0.715 0.725 0.716 0.812 0.544 LPIPS 0.145 0.167 0.069 0.093 0.066 0.087 0.351 0.361 0.360 0.371 0.198 0.468 Library PSNR 25.103 22.427 29.192 25.137 30.137 26.250 23.796 22.830 23.794 22.883 25.779 15.446 SSIM 0.671 0.620 0.782 0.699 0.806 0.746 0.589 0.574 0.589 0.574 0.692 0.417 LPIPS 0.286 0.324 0.209 0.249 0.206 0.243 0.423 0.435 0.423 0.435 0.260 0.585 On 360Roam Omni GS SC-Omni GS SC-Omni GS BARF L2G-Ne RF Cam P train test train test train test train test train test train test Perturb Point Init Sf M Random Sf M N/A N/A N/A Bar PSNR 18.915 14.718 24.876 22.090 25.410 22.556 19.457 18.499 19.803 18.794 22.946 12.600 SSIM 0.640 0.431 0.840 0.763 0.854 0.785 0.519 0.498 0.533 0.510 0.765 0.380 LPIPS 0.404 0.504 0.192 0.235 0.166 0.205 0.567 0.580 0.542 0.557 0.273 0.636 Base PSNR 21.449 14.559 28.322 24.780 29.226 24.308 20.986 20.024 21.382 20.122 25.179 13.251 SSIM 0.674 0.351 0.842 0.777 0.880 0.777 0.488 0.472 0.501 0.481 0.728 0.381 LPIPS 0.328 0.498 0.172 0.198 0.114 0.157 0.590 0.601 0.557 0.572 0.282 0.653 Cafe PSNR 22.313 15.680 28.156 23.917 29.278 25.171 22.169 19.895 22.518 20.146 26.908 13.689 SSIM 0.734 0.441 0.894 0.789 0.904 0.827 0.607 0.563 0.617 0.571 0.829 0.429 LPIPS 0.294 0.462 0.123 0.178 0.108 0.145 0.478 0.497 0.454 0.479 0.196 0.620 Canteen PSNR 22.814 14.273 27.494 21.251 27.259 22.139 21.395 18.887 21.761 17.027 26.388 12.691 SSIM 0.732 0.458 0.844 0.692 0.837 0.732 0.564 0.521 0.575 0.476 0.817 0.445 LPIPS 0.331 0.536 0.198 0.289 0.206 0.265 0.526 0.558 0.503 0.571 0.196 0.627 Center PSNR 22.740 15.597 28.972 24.482 29.706 25.304 22.275 19.689 22.859 16.855 26.616 14.471 SSIM 0.717 0.510 0.847 0.779 0.867 0.799 0.584 0.524 0.604 0.478 0.780 0.487 LPIPS 0.372 0.553 0.205 0.265 0.177 0.220 0.505 0.540 0.474 0.559 0.264 0.608 Innovation PSNR 21.880 16.047 28.916 25.943 30.079 24.788 22.291 21.242 22.761 21.450 25.890 13.361 SSIM 0.697 0.440 0.828 0.785 0.887 0.762 0.545 0.535 0.558 0.545 0.738 0.421 LPIPS 0.325 0.447 0.199 0.219 0.129 0.177 0.475 0.482 0.449 0.460 0.287 0.616 Lab PSNR 22.049 16.642 32.175 27.568 32.801 28.812 23.997 22.838 24.622 22.951 27.002 14.315 SSIM 0.762 0.563 0.930 0.874 0.938 0.895 0.709 0.692 0.729 0.707 0.837 0.530 LPIPS 0.299 0.421 0.089 0.122 0.068 0.090 0.361 0.372 0.314 0.330 0.209 0.594 Library PSNR 24.725 17.437 29.588 24.710 30.095 26.202 24.514 22.796 24.944 22.838 28.141 14.891 SSIM 0.684 0.445 0.791 0.703 0.805 0.743 0.584 0.558 0.600 0.568 0.798 0.422 LPIPS 0.323 0.495 0.225 0.289 0.207 0.244 0.430 0.451 0.402 0.430 0.205 0.623 Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Table 7: The training camera pose quantitative evaluation among calibration methods. Checked Perturb indicates perturbed camera poses as inputs, indicates training from scratch, Point Init indicates the way of point cloud initialization for 3D-GS based methods, p and R indicate Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of camera position (in world units) and rotation (in degrees), respectively. Methods marked with superscript are modified via omnidirectional sampling. SCOmni GS performs robust camera calibration capability in different scenarios and point initialization. On 360Roam BARF BARF L2G-Ne RF L2G-Ne RF Cam P Cam P SC-Omni GS SC-Omni GS Perturb Point Init N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A random Sf M Bar p 0.31873 0.11240 0.23656 0.05947 0.16559 0.16692 0.03811 0.03401 R 0.12260 0.03499 0.08151 0.06093 0.02700 0.02568 0.01880 0.01402 Base p 0.38139 0.03944 0.22836 0.18336 0.19603 0.19792 0.08044 0.02074 R 0.10911 0.00561 0.05018 0.02207 0.02758 0.02575 0.02459 0.00318 Cafe p 0.34125 0.32115 0.14891 0.18808 0.14154 0.14064 0.00651 0.00627 R 0.12002 0.08143 0.03887 0.07296 0.02560 0.02694 0.00236 0.00212 Canteen p 0.47954 0.24846 0.55104 0.58446 0.16421 0.16661 0.04292 0.03002 R 0.18377 0.09021 0.23060 0.18187 0.02624 0.02444 0.00592 0.00253 Center p 0.72546 0.53148 0.72888 0.81537 0.19709 0.19951 0.17692 0.10194 R 0.26783 0.19900 0.22620 0.38847 0.02768 0.02532 0.06964 0.00746 Innovation p 0.23938 0.20665 0.11435 0.30508 0.20174 0.20299 0.00565 0.02205 R 0.08755 0.06569 0.03044 0.06525 0.02823 0.025232 0.00190 0.00598 Lab p 0.07353 0.02230 0.03886 0.01235 0.23800 0.23774 0.01353 0.01432 R 0.02864 0.00385 0.01433 0.00301 0.03342 0.02524 0.00248 0.00191 Library p 0.27276 0.02723 0.26827 0.02759 0.21650 0.21446 0.11948 0.00632 R 0.07719 0.00248 0.07728 0.00283 0.02787 0.02771 0.01251 0.00162 On Omni Blender BARF BARF L2G-Ne RF L2G-Ne RF Cam P Cam P SC-Omni GS SC-Omni GS SC-Omni GS Perturb Point Init N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A Random Est. depth Render depth Barbershop p 0.14411 0.00053 0.00560 0.00048 0.18435 0.17873 0.11106 0.00032 0.00025 R 0.09418 0.00040 0.00529 0.00047 0.08132 0.07486 0.04919 0.00034 0.00024 Classroom p 0.00882 0.00059 0.36072 0.00062 0.21609 0.21072 0.00015 0.00023 0.00014 R 0.00995 0.00094 0.28451 0.00095 0.18112 0.16902 0.00028 0.00040 0.00021 Flat p 0.21386 0.00053 0.40058 0.00048 0.25824 0.25266 0.00051 0.00108 0.00032 R 0.15046 0.00109 0.19573 0.00113 0.07878 0.06339 0.00077 0.00351 0.00035 On Omni Blender BARF BARF L2G-Ne RF L2G-Ne RF Cam P Cam P SC-Omni GS SC-Omni GS SC-Omni GS Perturb Point Init N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A Random Est. depth Render depth Barbershop p 0.34757 0.00065 0.37682 0.00050 0.41992 0.11743 0.00126 0.00061 0.00037 R 0.30309 0.00058 0.24394 0.00047 0.07589 0.25327 0.00202 0.00065 0.00059 Classroom p 0.45917 0.00041 0.41830 0.00055 0.49153 0.33876 0.00071 0.00064 0.00018 R 0.34051 0.00061 0.30008 0.00096 0.25800 0.51458 0.00093 0.00111 0.00018 Flat p 0.31282 0.00050 0.39268 0.00034 0.27143 0.00096 0.00308 0.00093 0.00060 R 0.21171 0.00045 0.23691 0.00044 0.15632 0.01593 0.00883 0.00171 0.00088 Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Ground truth (a) Barbershop (b) Classroom (c) Canteen (d) Innovation Figure 7: Qualitative comparisons of 360-degree novel views among calibration methods equipped with omnidirectional sampling. Our results outperform in both rendering quality and camera accuracy. indicates training from scratch, indicates baselines modified via omnidirectional sampling. (a) Barbershop (b) Classroom (c) Canteen (d) Innovation Figure 8: Depth visualization of 360-degree views rendered by calibration methods equipped with omnidirectional sampling. Our results outperform in geometry accuracy and details. indicates training from scratch, indicates baselines modified via omnidirectional sampling. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Ground-truth Figure 9: Novel views on synthetic scene Flat among baselines trained from scratch. Ground-truth Figure 10: Novel views on real scene Cafe among baselines trained with camera perturbation. Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2025 Ground-truth Figure 11: Novel views on real scene Bar among baselines trained with camera perturbation. Ground-truth Figure 12: Novel views on real scene Base among baselines trained with camera perturbation.