PanoLess: Environment Reconstruction from Partial Reflective Views

Reflections from shiny objects and glass façades naturally extend the field of view of a camera, capturing the surrounding environment without the need to pan the camera or acquire a full panorama. We propose PanoLess, a Gaussian-splat–based framework that reconstructs the surrounding environment as a distant-illumination map from images captured on only one side of a reflective surface. PanoLess leverages surface-aligned 2D Gaussian splats with deferred shading to recover accurate per-pixel normals and reflection cues, which are fused into a neural cubemap representation of the environment. In addition, PanoLess produces a visibility map that explicitly denotes which regions of the environment are supported by the partial reflective observations. Unlike existing inverse-rendering and reflection-aware Gaussian-splatting approaches—which typically require full 360◦ coverage and struggle under incomplete views—PanoLess enables consistent, physically grounded illumination estimation from partial-view input. We show that PanoLess achieves high-fidelity and geometrically consistent environment reconstruction, outperforming reflection-aware baselines on a new custom synthetic benchmark and publicly available datasets, and demonstrating generalization to real-world reflective captures.