arXiv subjects

Peter Stehr

Publications and source records attributed to Peter Stehr.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Predictive Photometric Uncertainty in Gaussian Splatting for Novel View Synthesis

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting have enabled impressive photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, to transition from a pure rendering engine to a reliable spatial map for autonomous agents and safety-critical applications, knowing where the representation is uncertain is as important as the rendering fidelity itself. We bridge this critical gap by introducing a lightweight, plug-and-play framework for pixel-wise, view-dependent predictive uncertainty estimation. Our post-hoc method formulates uncertainty as a Bayesian-regularized linear least-squares optimization over reconstruction residuals. This architecture-agnostic approach extracts a per-primitive uncertainty channel without modifying the underlying scene representation or degrading baseline visual fidelity. Crucially, we demonstrate that providing this actionable reliability signal successfully translates 3D Gaussian splatting into a trustworthy spatial map, further improving state-of-the-art performance across three critical downstream perception tasks: active view selection, pose-agnostic scene change detection, and pose-agnostic anomaly detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Probabilistic Label Spreading: Efficient and Consistent Estimation of Soft Labels with Epistemic Uncertainty on Graphs

Safe artificial intelligence for perception tasks remains a major challenge, partly due to the lack of data with high-quality labels. Annotations themselves are subject to aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty, which is typically ignored during annotation and evaluation. While crowdsourcing enables collecting multiple annotations per image to estimate these uncertainties, this approach is impractical at scale due to the required annotation effort. We introduce a probabilistic label spreading method that provides reliable estimates of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty of labels. Assuming label smoothness over the feature space, we propagate single annotations using a graph-based diffusion method. We prove that label spreading yields consistent probability estimators even when the number of annotations per data point converges to zero. We present and analyze a scalable implementation of our method. Experimental results indicate that, compared to baselines, our approach substantially reduces the annotation budget required to achieve a desired label quality on common image datasets and achieves a new state of the art on the Data-Centric Image Classification benchmark.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

PRIMU: Uncertainty Estimation for Novel Views in Gaussian Splatting from Primitive-Based Representations of Error and Coverage

We introduce Primitive-based Representations of Uncertainty (PRIMU), a post-hoc uncertainty estimation (UE) framework for Gaussian Splatting (GS). Reliable UE is essential for deploying GS in safety-critical domains such as robotics and medicine. Existing approaches typically estimate Gaussian-primitive variances and rely on the rendering process to obtain pixel-wise uncertainties. In contrast, we construct primitive-level representations of error and visibility/coverage from training views, capturing interpretable uncertainty information. These representations are obtained by projecting view-dependent training errors and coverage statistics onto the primitives. Uncertainties for novel views are inferred by rendering these primitive-level representations, producing uncertainty feature maps, which are aggregate through pixel-wise regression on holdout data. We analyze combinations of uncertainty feature maps and regression models to understand how their interactions affect prediction accuracy and generalization. PRIMU also enables an effective active view selection strategy by directly leveraging these uncertainty feature maps. Additionally, we study the effect of separating splatting into foreground and background regions. Our estimates show strong correlations with true errors, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, especially for depth UE and foreground objects. Finally, our regression models show generalization capabilities to unseen scenes, enabling UE without additional holdout data.

cs.GR↗