Prior-Guided Single-Exposure HDR Novel View Synthesis via Base-Gain Representation

Single-exposure high dynamic range (HDR) novel view synthesis (NVS) recovers HDR scenes from low dynamic range (LDR) views captured at a single exposure and estimates camera response function (CRF) for LDR re-exposure. Without HDR ground-truth, using single-exposure LDR views as the sole source of direct supervision underconstrains HDR reconstruction and cannot ensure its faithful recovery, motivating the need for learned LDR-to-HDR reconstruction priors. Moreover, single-exposure LDR views supervise CRF only over a limited range, necessitating a learnable prior for reliable re-exposure beyond it. We propose PriorGS, a 3D Gaussian Splatting framework that addresses both challenges by (1) guiding HDR recovery with pseudo-HDR supervision from 2D single-exposure HDR reconstruction methods while anchoring it to input LDR views through a closed reconstruction loop; and (2) regularizing CRF modeling with a learnable prior that guarantees monotonicity and promotes plausible responses. Yet cross-view inconsistencies in independently generated pseudo-HDR targets impair scene reconstruction when HDR is encoded directly as Gaussian's color attribute. We therefore introduce a 3D base–gain HDR representation that factors HDR radiance into an LDR base and an overlaid 3D gain field, promoting robustness to such inconsistencies and enabling 3D HDR appearance editing. Extensive experiments across public datasets demonstrate PriorGS's substantial superiority over baselines. A short demo video is included in the supplementary materials.