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Sep 8

Compact 3D Scene Representation via Self-Organizing Gaussian Grids

3D Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as a highly promising technique for modeling of static 3D scenes. In contrast to Neural Radiance Fields, it utilizes efficient rasterization allowing for very fast rendering at high-quality. However, the storage size is significantly higher, which hinders practical deployment, e.g.~on resource constrained devices. In this paper, we introduce a compact scene representation organizing the parameters of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into a 2D grid with local homogeneity, ensuring a drastic reduction in storage requirements without compromising visual quality during rendering. Central to our idea is the explicit exploitation of perceptual redundancies present in natural scenes. In essence, the inherent nature of a scene allows for numerous permutations of Gaussian parameters to equivalently represent it. To this end, we propose a novel highly parallel algorithm that regularly arranges the high-dimensional Gaussian parameters into a 2D grid while preserving their neighborhood structure. During training, we further enforce local smoothness between the sorted parameters in the grid. The uncompressed Gaussians use the same structure as 3DGS, ensuring a seamless integration with established renderers. Our method achieves a reduction factor of 8x to 26x in size for complex scenes with no increase in training time, marking a substantial leap forward in the domain of 3D scene distribution and consumption. Additional information can be found on our project page: https://fraunhoferhhi.github.io/Self-Organizing-Gaussians/

All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Key-Secured 3D Secrets within 3D Gaussian Splatting

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have revolutionized scene reconstruction, opening new possibilities for 3D steganography by hiding 3D secrets within 3D covers. The key challenge in steganography is ensuring imperceptibility while maintaining high-fidelity reconstruction. However, existing methods often suffer from detectability risks and utilize only suboptimal 3DGS features, limiting their full potential. We propose a novel end-to-end key-secured 3D steganography framework (KeySS) that jointly optimizes a 3DGS model and a key-secured decoder for secret reconstruction. Our approach reveals that Gaussian features contribute unequally to secret hiding. The framework incorporates a key-controllable mechanism enabling multi-secret hiding and unauthorized access prevention, while systematically exploring optimal feature update to balance fidelity and security. To rigorously evaluate steganographic imperceptibility beyond conventional 2D metrics, we introduce 3D-Sinkhorn distance analysis, which quantifies distributional differences between original and steganographic Gaussian parameters in the representation space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both cover and secret reconstruction while maintaining high security levels, advancing the field of 3D steganography. Code is available at https://github.com/RY-Paper/KeySS

SparSplat: Fast Multi-View Reconstruction with Generalizable 2D Gaussian Splatting

Recovering 3D information from scenes via multi-view stereo reconstruction (MVS) and novel view synthesis (NVS) is inherently challenging, particularly in scenarios involving sparse-view setups. The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enabled real-time, photorealistic NVS. Following this, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) leveraged perspective accurate 2D Gaussian primitive rasterization to achieve accurate geometry representation during rendering, improving 3D scene reconstruction while maintaining real-time performance. Recent approaches have tackled the problem of sparse real-time NVS using 3DGS within a generalizable, MVS-based learning framework to regress 3D Gaussian parameters. Our work extends this line of research by addressing the challenge of generalizable sparse 3D reconstruction and NVS jointly, and manages to perform successfully at both tasks. We propose an MVS-based learning pipeline that regresses 2DGS surface element parameters in a feed-forward fashion to perform 3D shape reconstruction and NVS from sparse-view images. We further show that our generalizable pipeline can benefit from preexisting foundational multi-view deep visual features. The resulting model attains the state-of-the-art results on the DTU sparse 3D reconstruction benchmark in terms of Chamfer distance to ground-truth, as-well as state-of-the-art NVS. It also demonstrates strong generalization on the BlendedMVS and Tanks and Temples datasets. We note that our model outperforms the prior state-of-the-art in feed-forward sparse view reconstruction based on volume rendering of implicit representations, while offering an almost 2 orders of magnitude higher inference speed.

Relightable 3D Gaussian: Real-time Point Cloud Relighting with BRDF Decomposition and Ray Tracing

We present a novel differentiable point-based rendering framework for material and lighting decomposition from multi-view images, enabling editing, ray-tracing, and real-time relighting of the 3D point cloud. Specifically, a 3D scene is represented as a set of relightable 3D Gaussian points, where each point is additionally associated with a normal direction, BRDF parameters, and incident lights from different directions. To achieve robust lighting estimation, we further divide incident lights of each point into global and local components, as well as view-dependent visibilities. The 3D scene is optimized through the 3D Gaussian Splatting technique while BRDF and lighting are decomposed by physically-based differentiable rendering. Moreover, we introduce an innovative point-based ray-tracing approach based on the bounding volume hierarchy for efficient visibility baking, enabling real-time rendering and relighting of 3D Gaussian points with accurate shadow effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved BRDF estimation and novel view rendering results compared to state-of-the-art material estimation approaches. Our framework showcases the potential to revolutionize the mesh-based graphics pipeline with a relightable, traceable, and editable rendering pipeline solely based on point cloud. Project page:https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Relightable3DGaussian/.

RGM: Reconstructing High-fidelity 3D Car Assets with Relightable 3D-GS Generative Model from a Single Image

The generation of high-quality 3D car assets is essential for various applications, including video games, autonomous driving, and virtual reality. Current 3D generation methods utilizing NeRF or 3D-GS as representations for 3D objects, generate a Lambertian object under fixed lighting and lack separated modelings for material and global illumination. As a result, the generated assets are unsuitable for relighting under varying lighting conditions, limiting their applicability in downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel relightable 3D object generative framework that automates the creation of 3D car assets, enabling the swift and accurate reconstruction of a vehicle's geometry, texture, and material properties from a single input image. Our approach begins with introducing a large-scale synthetic car dataset comprising over 1,000 high-precision 3D vehicle models. We represent 3D objects using global illumination and relightable 3D Gaussian primitives integrating with BRDF parameters. Building on this representation, we introduce a feed-forward model that takes images as input and outputs both relightable 3D Gaussians and global illumination parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces photorealistic 3D car assets that can be seamlessly integrated into road scenes with different illuminations, which offers substantial practical benefits for industrial applications.

GaussianCross: Cross-modal Self-supervised 3D Representation Learning via Gaussian Splatting

The significance of informative and robust point representations has been widely acknowledged for 3D scene understanding. Despite existing self-supervised pre-training counterparts demonstrating promising performance, the model collapse and structural information deficiency remain prevalent due to insufficient point discrimination difficulty, yielding unreliable expressions and suboptimal performance. In this paper, we present GaussianCross, a novel cross-modal self-supervised 3D representation learning architecture integrating feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) techniques to address current challenges. GaussianCross seamlessly converts scale-inconsistent 3D point clouds into a unified cuboid-normalized Gaussian representation without missing details, enabling stable and generalizable pre-training. Subsequently, a tri-attribute adaptive distillation splatting module is incorporated to construct a 3D feature field, facilitating synergetic feature capturing of appearance, geometry, and semantic cues to maintain cross-modal consistency. To validate GaussianCross, we perform extensive evaluations on various benchmarks, including ScanNet, ScanNet200, and S3DIS. In particular, GaussianCross shows a prominent parameter and data efficiency, achieving superior performance through linear probing (<0.1% parameters) and limited data training (1% of scenes) compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, GaussianCross demonstrates strong generalization capabilities, improving the full fine-tuning accuracy by 9.3% mIoU and 6.1% AP_{50} on ScanNet200 semantic and instance segmentation tasks, respectively, supporting the effectiveness of our approach. The code, weights, and visualizations are publicly available at https://rayyoh.github.io/GaussianCross/{https://rayyoh.github.io/GaussianCross/}.

GS-DiT: Advancing Video Generation with Pseudo 4D Gaussian Fields through Efficient Dense 3D Point Tracking

4D video control is essential in video generation as it enables the use of sophisticated lens techniques, such as multi-camera shooting and dolly zoom, which are currently unsupported by existing methods. Training a video Diffusion Transformer (DiT) directly to control 4D content requires expensive multi-view videos. Inspired by Monocular Dynamic novel View Synthesis (MDVS) that optimizes a 4D representation and renders videos according to different 4D elements, such as camera pose and object motion editing, we bring pseudo 4D Gaussian fields to video generation. Specifically, we propose a novel framework that constructs a pseudo 4D Gaussian field with dense 3D point tracking and renders the Gaussian field for all video frames. Then we finetune a pretrained DiT to generate videos following the guidance of the rendered video, dubbed as GS-DiT. To boost the training of the GS-DiT, we also propose an efficient Dense 3D Point Tracking (D3D-PT) method for the pseudo 4D Gaussian field construction. Our D3D-PT outperforms SpatialTracker, the state-of-the-art sparse 3D point tracking method, in accuracy and accelerates the inference speed by two orders of magnitude. During the inference stage, GS-DiT can generate videos with the same dynamic content while adhering to different camera parameters, addressing a significant limitation of current video generation models. GS-DiT demonstrates strong generalization capabilities and extends the 4D controllability of Gaussian splatting to video generation beyond just camera poses. It supports advanced cinematic effects through the manipulation of the Gaussian field and camera intrinsics, making it a powerful tool for creative video production. Demos are available at https://wkbian.github.io/Projects/GS-DiT/.

EvaGaussians: Event Stream Assisted Gaussian Splatting from Blurry Images

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has demonstrated exceptional capabilities in 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, its training heavily depends on high-quality, sharp images and accurate camera poses. Fulfilling these requirements can be challenging in non-ideal real-world scenarios, where motion-blurred images are commonly encountered in high-speed moving cameras or low-light environments that require long exposure times. To address these challenges, we introduce Event Stream Assisted Gaussian Splatting (EvaGaussians), a novel approach that integrates event streams captured by an event camera to assist in reconstructing high-quality 3D-GS from blurry images. Capitalizing on the high temporal resolution and dynamic range offered by the event camera, we leverage the event streams to explicitly model the formation process of motion-blurred images and guide the deblurring reconstruction of 3D-GS. By jointly optimizing the 3D-GS parameters and recovering camera motion trajectories during the exposure time, our method can robustly facilitate the acquisition of high-fidelity novel views with intricate texture details. We comprehensively evaluated our method and compared it with previous state-of-the-art deblurring rendering methods. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate that our method surpasses existing techniques in restoring fine details from blurry images and producing high-fidelity novel views.

Mesh-based Gaussian Splatting for Real-time Large-scale Deformation

Neural implicit representations, including Neural Distance Fields and Neural Radiance Fields, have demonstrated significant capabilities for reconstructing surfaces with complicated geometry and topology, and generating novel views of a scene. Nevertheless, it is challenging for users to directly deform or manipulate these implicit representations with large deformations in the real-time fashion. Gaussian Splatting(GS) has recently become a promising method with explicit geometry for representing static scenes and facilitating high-quality and real-time synthesis of novel views. However,it cannot be easily deformed due to the use of discrete Gaussians and lack of explicit topology. To address this, we develop a novel GS-based method that enables interactive deformation. Our key idea is to design an innovative mesh-based GS representation, which is integrated into Gaussian learning and manipulation. 3D Gaussians are defined over an explicit mesh, and they are bound with each other: the rendering of 3D Gaussians guides the mesh face split for adaptive refinement, and the mesh face split directs the splitting of 3D Gaussians. Moreover, the explicit mesh constraints help regularize the Gaussian distribution, suppressing poor-quality Gaussians(e.g. misaligned Gaussians,long-narrow shaped Gaussians), thus enhancing visual quality and avoiding artifacts during deformation. Based on this representation, we further introduce a large-scale Gaussian deformation technique to enable deformable GS, which alters the parameters of 3D Gaussians according to the manipulation of the associated mesh. Our method benefits from existing mesh deformation datasets for more realistic data-driven Gaussian deformation. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves high-quality reconstruction and effective deformation, while maintaining the promising rendering results at a high frame rate(65 FPS on average).

InstantSplat: Unbounded Sparse-view Pose-free Gaussian Splatting in 40 Seconds

While novel view synthesis (NVS) has made substantial progress in 3D computer vision, it typically requires an initial estimation of camera intrinsics and extrinsics from dense viewpoints. This pre-processing is usually conducted via a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline, a procedure that can be slow and unreliable, particularly in sparse-view scenarios with insufficient matched features for accurate reconstruction. In this work, we integrate the strengths of point-based representations (e.g., 3D Gaussian Splatting, 3D-GS) with end-to-end dense stereo models (DUSt3R) to tackle the complex yet unresolved issues in NVS under unconstrained settings, which encompasses pose-free and sparse view challenges. Our framework, InstantSplat, unifies dense stereo priors with 3D-GS to build 3D Gaussians of large-scale scenes from sparseview & pose-free images in less than 1 minute. Specifically, InstantSplat comprises a Coarse Geometric Initialization (CGI) module that swiftly establishes a preliminary scene structure and camera parameters across all training views, utilizing globally-aligned 3D point maps derived from a pre-trained dense stereo pipeline. This is followed by the Fast 3D-Gaussian Optimization (F-3DGO) module, which jointly optimizes the 3D Gaussian attributes and the initialized poses with pose regularization. Experiments conducted on the large-scale outdoor Tanks & Temples datasets demonstrate that InstantSplat significantly improves SSIM (by 32%) while concurrently reducing Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) by 80%. These establish InstantSplat as a viable solution for scenarios involving posefree and sparse-view conditions. Project page: instantsplat.github.io.

Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting for Animatable Human Avatars

Recent advances in neural radiance fields enable novel view synthesis of photo-realistic images in dynamic settings, which can be applied to scenarios with human animation. Commonly used implicit backbones to establish accurate models, however, require many input views and additional annotations such as human masks, UV maps and depth maps. In this work, we propose ParDy-Human (Parameterized Dynamic Human Avatar), a fully explicit approach to construct a digital avatar from as little as a single monocular sequence. ParDy-Human introduces parameter-driven dynamics into 3D Gaussian Splatting where 3D Gaussians are deformed by a human pose model to animate the avatar. Our method is composed of two parts: A first module that deforms canonical 3D Gaussians according to SMPL vertices and a consecutive module that further takes their designed joint encodings and predicts per Gaussian deformations to deal with dynamics beyond SMPL vertex deformations. Images are then synthesized by a rasterizer. ParDy-Human constitutes an explicit model for realistic dynamic human avatars which requires significantly fewer training views and images. Our avatars learning is free of additional annotations such as masks and can be trained with variable backgrounds while inferring full-resolution images efficiently even on consumer hardware. We provide experimental evidence to show that ParDy-Human outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ZJU-MoCap and THUman4.0 datasets both quantitatively and visually.

SplArt: Articulation Estimation and Part-Level Reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Reconstructing articulated objects prevalent in daily environments is crucial for applications in augmented/virtual reality and robotics. However, existing methods face scalability limitations (requiring 3D supervision or costly annotations), robustness issues (being susceptible to local optima), and rendering shortcomings (lacking speed or photorealism). We introduce SplArt, a self-supervised, category-agnostic framework that leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to reconstruct articulated objects and infer kinematics from two sets of posed RGB images captured at different articulation states, enabling real-time photorealistic rendering for novel viewpoints and articulations. SplArt augments 3DGS with a differentiable mobility parameter per Gaussian, achieving refined part segmentation. A multi-stage optimization strategy is employed to progressively handle reconstruction, part segmentation, and articulation estimation, significantly enhancing robustness and accuracy. SplArt exploits geometric self-supervision, effectively addressing challenging scenarios without requiring 3D annotations or category-specific priors. Evaluations on established and newly proposed benchmarks, along with applications to real-world scenarios using a handheld RGB camera, demonstrate SplArt's state-of-the-art performance and real-world practicality. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ripl/splart.

CATSplat: Context-Aware Transformer with Spatial Guidance for Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting from A Single-View Image

Recently, generalizable feed-forward methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting have gained significant attention for their potential to reconstruct 3D scenes using finite resources. These approaches create a 3D radiance field, parameterized by per-pixel 3D Gaussian primitives, from just a few images in a single forward pass. However, unlike multi-view methods that benefit from cross-view correspondences, 3D scene reconstruction with a single-view image remains an underexplored area. In this work, we introduce CATSplat, a novel generalizable transformer-based framework designed to break through the inherent constraints in monocular settings. First, we propose leveraging textual guidance from a visual-language model to complement insufficient information from a single image. By incorporating scene-specific contextual details from text embeddings through cross-attention, we pave the way for context-aware 3D scene reconstruction beyond relying solely on visual cues. Moreover, we advocate utilizing spatial guidance from 3D point features toward comprehensive geometric understanding under single-view settings. With 3D priors, image features can capture rich structural insights for predicting 3D Gaussians without multi-view techniques. Extensive experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of CATSplat in single-view 3D scene reconstruction with high-quality novel view synthesis.

OGGSplat: Open Gaussian Growing for Generalizable Reconstruction with Expanded Field-of-View

Reconstructing semantic-aware 3D scenes from sparse views is a challenging yet essential research direction, driven by the demands of emerging applications such as virtual reality and embodied AI. Existing per-scene optimization methods require dense input views and incur high computational costs, while generalizable approaches often struggle to reconstruct regions outside the input view cone. In this paper, we propose OGGSplat, an open Gaussian growing method that expands the field-of-view in generalizable 3D reconstruction. Our key insight is that the semantic attributes of open Gaussians provide strong priors for image extrapolation, enabling both semantic consistency and visual plausibility. Specifically, once open Gaussians are initialized from sparse views, we introduce an RGB-semantic consistent inpainting module applied to selected rendered views. This module enforces bidirectional control between an image diffusion model and a semantic diffusion model. The inpainted regions are then lifted back into 3D space for efficient and progressive Gaussian parameter optimization. To evaluate our method, we establish a Gaussian Outpainting (GO) benchmark that assesses both semantic and generative quality of reconstructed open-vocabulary scenes. OGGSplat also demonstrates promising semantic-aware scene reconstruction capabilities when provided with two view images captured directly from a smartphone camera.

High-fidelity 3D Object Generation from Single Image with RGBN-Volume Gaussian Reconstruction Model

Recently single-view 3D generation via Gaussian splatting has emerged and developed quickly. They learn 3D Gaussians from 2D RGB images generated from pre-trained multi-view diffusion (MVD) models, and have shown a promising avenue for 3D generation through a single image. Despite the current progress, these methods still suffer from the inconsistency jointly caused by the geometric ambiguity in the 2D images, and the lack of structure of 3D Gaussians, leading to distorted and blurry 3D object generation. In this paper, we propose to fix these issues by GS-RGBN, a new RGBN-volume Gaussian Reconstruction Model designed to generate high-fidelity 3D objects from single-view images. Our key insight is a structured 3D representation can simultaneously mitigate the afore-mentioned two issues. To this end, we propose a novel hybrid Voxel-Gaussian representation, where a 3D voxel representation contains explicit 3D geometric information, eliminating the geometric ambiguity from 2D images. It also structures Gaussians during learning so that the optimization tends to find better local optima. Our 3D voxel representation is obtained by a fusion module that aligns RGB features and surface normal features, both of which can be estimated from 2D images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our methods over prior works in terms of high-quality reconstruction results, robust generalization, and good efficiency.

GVGEN: Text-to-3D Generation with Volumetric Representation

In recent years, 3D Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful technique for 3D reconstruction and generation, known for its fast and high-quality rendering capabilities. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel diffusion-based framework, GVGEN, designed to efficiently generate 3D Gaussian representations from text input. We propose two innovative techniques:(1) Structured Volumetric Representation. We first arrange disorganized 3D Gaussian points as a structured form GaussianVolume. This transformation allows the capture of intricate texture details within a volume composed of a fixed number of Gaussians. To better optimize the representation of these details, we propose a unique pruning and densifying method named the Candidate Pool Strategy, enhancing detail fidelity through selective optimization. (2) Coarse-to-fine Generation Pipeline. To simplify the generation of GaussianVolume and empower the model to generate instances with detailed 3D geometry, we propose a coarse-to-fine pipeline. It initially constructs a basic geometric structure, followed by the prediction of complete Gaussian attributes. Our framework, GVGEN, demonstrates superior performance in qualitative and quantitative assessments compared to existing 3D generation methods. Simultaneously, it maintains a fast generation speed (sim7 seconds), effectively striking a balance between quality and efficiency.

PSAvatar: A Point-based Morphable Shape Model for Real-Time Head Avatar Animation with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Despite much progress, achieving real-time high-fidelity head avatar animation is still difficult and existing methods have to trade-off between speed and quality. 3DMM based methods often fail to model non-facial structures such as eyeglasses and hairstyles, while neural implicit models suffer from deformation inflexibility and rendering inefficiency. Although 3D Gaussian has been demonstrated to possess promising capability for geometry representation and radiance field reconstruction, applying 3D Gaussian in head avatar creation remains a major challenge since it is difficult for 3D Gaussian to model the head shape variations caused by changing poses and expressions. In this paper, we introduce PSAvatar, a novel framework for animatable head avatar creation that utilizes discrete geometric primitive to create a parametric morphable shape model and employs 3D Gaussian for fine detail representation and high fidelity rendering. The parametric morphable shape model is a Point-based Morphable Shape Model (PMSM) which uses points instead of meshes for 3D representation to achieve enhanced representation flexibility. The PMSM first converts the FLAME mesh to points by sampling on the surfaces as well as off the meshes to enable the reconstruction of not only surface-like structures but also complex geometries such as eyeglasses and hairstyles. By aligning these points with the head shape in an analysis-by-synthesis manner, the PMSM makes it possible to utilize 3D Gaussian for fine detail representation and appearance modeling, thus enabling the creation of high-fidelity avatars. We show that PSAvatar can reconstruct high-fidelity head avatars of a variety of subjects and the avatars can be animated in real-time (ge 25 fps at a resolution of 512 times 512 ).

PointGS: Point Attention-Aware Sparse View Synthesis with Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) is an innovative rendering technique that surpasses the neural radiance field (NeRF) in both rendering speed and visual quality by leveraging an explicit 3D scene representation. Existing 3DGS approaches require a large number of calibrated views to generate a consistent and complete scene representation. When input views are limited, 3DGS tends to overfit the training views, leading to noticeable degradation in rendering quality. To address this limitation, we propose a Point-wise Feature-Aware Gaussian Splatting framework that enables real-time, high-quality rendering from sparse training views. Specifically, we first employ the latest stereo foundation model to estimate accurate camera poses and reconstruct a dense point cloud for Gaussian initialization. We then encode the colour attributes of each 3D Gaussian by sampling and aggregating multiscale 2D appearance features from sparse inputs. To enhance point-wise appearance representation, we design a point interaction network based on a self-attention mechanism, allowing each Gaussian point to interact with its nearest neighbors. These enriched features are subsequently decoded into Gaussian parameters through two lightweight multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) for final rendering. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms NeRF-based approaches and achieves competitive performance under few-shot settings compared to the state-of-the-art 3DGS methods.

CoherentGS: Sparse Novel View Synthesis with Coherent 3D Gaussians

The field of 3D reconstruction from images has rapidly evolved in the past few years, first with the introduction of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and more recently with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). The latter provides a significant edge over NeRF in terms of the training and inference speed, as well as the reconstruction quality. Although 3DGS works well for dense input images, the unstructured point-cloud like representation quickly overfits to the more challenging setup of extremely sparse input images (e.g., 3 images), creating a representation that appears as a jumble of needles from novel views. To address this issue, we propose regularized optimization and depth-based initialization. Our key idea is to introduce a structured Gaussian representation that can be controlled in 2D image space. We then constraint the Gaussians, in particular their position, and prevent them from moving independently during optimization. Specifically, we introduce single and multiview constraints through an implicit convolutional decoder and a total variation loss, respectively. With the coherency introduced to the Gaussians, we further constrain the optimization through a flow-based loss function. To support our regularized optimization, we propose an approach to initialize the Gaussians using monocular depth estimates at each input view. We demonstrate significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art sparse-view NeRF-based approaches on a variety of scenes.

Adversarial Generation of Hierarchical Gaussians for 3D Generative Model

Most advances in 3D Generative Adversarial Networks (3D GANs) largely depend on ray casting-based volume rendering, which incurs demanding rendering costs. One promising alternative is rasterization-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS), providing a much faster rendering speed and explicit 3D representation. In this paper, we exploit Gaussian as a 3D representation for 3D GANs by leveraging its efficient and explicit characteristics. However, in an adversarial framework, we observe that a na\"ive generator architecture suffers from training instability and lacks the capability to adjust the scale of Gaussians. This leads to model divergence and visual artifacts due to the absence of proper guidance for initialized positions of Gaussians and densification to manage their scales adaptively. To address these issues, we introduce a generator architecture with a hierarchical multi-scale Gaussian representation that effectively regularizes the position and scale of generated Gaussians. Specifically, we design a hierarchy of Gaussians where finer-level Gaussians are parameterized by their coarser-level counterparts; the position of finer-level Gaussians would be located near their coarser-level counterparts, and the scale would monotonically decrease as the level becomes finer, modeling both coarse and fine details of the 3D scene. Experimental results demonstrate that ours achieves a significantly faster rendering speed (x100) compared to state-of-the-art 3D consistent GANs with comparable 3D generation capability. Project page: https://hse1032.github.io/gsgan.

3D Convex Splatting: Radiance Field Rendering with 3D Smooth Convexes

Recent advances in radiance field reconstruction, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have achieved high-quality novel view synthesis and fast rendering by representing scenes with compositions of Gaussian primitives. However, 3D Gaussians present several limitations for scene reconstruction. Accurately capturing hard edges is challenging without significantly increasing the number of Gaussians, creating a large memory footprint. Moreover, they struggle to represent flat surfaces, as they are diffused in space. Without hand-crafted regularizers, they tend to disperse irregularly around the actual surface. To circumvent these issues, we introduce a novel method, named 3D Convex Splatting (3DCS), which leverages 3D smooth convexes as primitives for modeling geometrically-meaningful radiance fields from multi-view images. Smooth convex shapes offer greater flexibility than Gaussians, allowing for a better representation of 3D scenes with hard edges and dense volumes using fewer primitives. Powered by our efficient CUDA-based rasterizer, 3DCS achieves superior performance over 3DGS on benchmarks such as Mip-NeRF360, Tanks and Temples, and Deep Blending. Specifically, our method attains an improvement of up to 0.81 in PSNR and 0.026 in LPIPS compared to 3DGS while maintaining high rendering speeds and reducing the number of required primitives. Our results highlight the potential of 3D Convex Splatting to become the new standard for high-quality scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Project page: convexsplatting.github.io.

MVGS: Multi-view-regulated Gaussian Splatting for Novel View Synthesis

Recent works in volume rendering, e.g. NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), significantly advance the rendering quality and efficiency with the help of the learned implicit neural radiance field or 3D Gaussians. Rendering on top of an explicit representation, the vanilla 3DGS and its variants deliver real-time efficiency by optimizing the parametric model with single-view supervision per iteration during training which is adopted from NeRF. Consequently, certain views are overfitted, leading to unsatisfying appearance in novel-view synthesis and imprecise 3D geometries. To solve aforementioned problems, we propose a new 3DGS optimization method embodying four key novel contributions: 1) We transform the conventional single-view training paradigm into a multi-view training strategy. With our proposed multi-view regulation, 3D Gaussian attributes are further optimized without overfitting certain training views. As a general solution, we improve the overall accuracy in a variety of scenarios and different Gaussian variants. 2) Inspired by the benefit introduced by additional views, we further propose a cross-intrinsic guidance scheme, leading to a coarse-to-fine training procedure concerning different resolutions. 3) Built on top of our multi-view regulated training, we further propose a cross-ray densification strategy, densifying more Gaussian kernels in the ray-intersect regions from a selection of views. 4) By further investigating the densification strategy, we found that the effect of densification should be enhanced when certain views are distinct dramatically. As a solution, we propose a novel multi-view augmented densification strategy, where 3D Gaussians are encouraged to get densified to a sufficient number accordingly, resulting in improved reconstruction accuracy.

Gaussian Splatting with NeRF-based Color and Opacity

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated the remarkable potential of neural networks to capture the intricacies of 3D objects. By encoding the shape and color information within neural network weights, NeRFs excel at producing strikingly sharp novel views of 3D objects. Recently, numerous generalizations of NeRFs utilizing generative models have emerged, expanding its versatility. In contrast, Gaussian Splatting (GS) offers a similar render quality with faster training and inference as it does not need neural networks to work. It encodes information about the 3D objects in the set of Gaussian distributions that can be rendered in 3D similarly to classical meshes. Unfortunately, GS are difficult to condition since they usually require circa hundred thousand Gaussian components. To mitigate the caveats of both models, we propose a hybrid model Viewing Direction Gaussian Splatting (VDGS) that uses GS representation of the 3D object's shape and NeRF-based encoding of color and opacity. Our model uses Gaussian distributions with trainable positions (i.e. means of Gaussian), shape (i.e. covariance of Gaussian), color and opacity, and a neural network that takes Gaussian parameters and viewing direction to produce changes in the said color and opacity. As a result, our model better describes shadows, light reflections, and the transparency of 3D objects without adding additional texture and light components.

UV Gaussians: Joint Learning of Mesh Deformation and Gaussian Textures for Human Avatar Modeling

Reconstructing photo-realistic drivable human avatars from multi-view image sequences has been a popular and challenging topic in the field of computer vision and graphics. While existing NeRF-based methods can achieve high-quality novel view rendering of human models, both training and inference processes are time-consuming. Recent approaches have utilized 3D Gaussians to represent the human body, enabling faster training and rendering. However, they undermine the importance of the mesh guidance and directly predict Gaussians in 3D space with coarse mesh guidance. This hinders the learning procedure of the Gaussians and tends to produce blurry textures. Therefore, we propose UV Gaussians, which models the 3D human body by jointly learning mesh deformations and 2D UV-space Gaussian textures. We utilize the embedding of UV map to learn Gaussian textures in 2D space, leveraging the capabilities of powerful 2D networks to extract features. Additionally, through an independent Mesh network, we optimize pose-dependent geometric deformations, thereby guiding Gaussian rendering and significantly enhancing rendering quality. We collect and process a new dataset of human motion, which includes multi-view images, scanned models, parametric model registration, and corresponding texture maps. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art synthesis of novel view and novel pose. The code and data will be made available on the homepage https://alex-jyj.github.io/UV-Gaussians/ once the paper is accepted.

360-GS: Layout-guided Panoramic Gaussian Splatting For Indoor Roaming

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has recently attracted great attention with real-time and photo-realistic renderings. This technique typically takes perspective images as input and optimizes a set of 3D elliptical Gaussians by splatting them onto the image planes, resulting in 2D Gaussians. However, applying 3D-GS to panoramic inputs presents challenges in effectively modeling the projection onto the spherical surface of {360^circ} images using 2D Gaussians. In practical applications, input panoramas are often sparse, leading to unreliable initialization of 3D Gaussians and subsequent degradation of 3D-GS quality. In addition, due to the under-constrained geometry of texture-less planes (e.g., walls and floors), 3D-GS struggles to model these flat regions with elliptical Gaussians, resulting in significant floaters in novel views. To address these issues, we propose 360-GS, a novel 360^{circ} Gaussian splatting for a limited set of panoramic inputs. Instead of splatting 3D Gaussians directly onto the spherical surface, 360-GS projects them onto the tangent plane of the unit sphere and then maps them to the spherical projections. This adaptation enables the representation of the projection using Gaussians. We guide the optimization of 360-GS by exploiting layout priors within panoramas, which are simple to obtain and contain strong structural information about the indoor scene. Our experimental results demonstrate that 360-GS allows panoramic rendering and outperforms state-of-the-art methods with fewer artifacts in novel view synthesis, thus providing immersive roaming in indoor scenarios.

EdgeGaussians -- 3D Edge Mapping via Gaussian Splatting

With their meaningful geometry and their omnipresence in the 3D world, edges are extremely useful primitives in computer vision. 3D edges comprise of lines and curves, and methods to reconstruct them use either multi-view images or point clouds as input. State-of-the-art image-based methods first learn a 3D edge point cloud then fit 3D edges to it. The edge point cloud is obtained by learning a 3D neural implicit edge field from which the 3D edge points are sampled on a specific level set (0 or 1). However, such methods present two important drawbacks: i) it is not realistic to sample points on exact level sets due to float imprecision and training inaccuracies. Instead, they are sampled within a range of levels so the points do not lie accurately on the 3D edges and require further processing. ii) Such implicit representations are computationally expensive and require long training times. In this paper, we address these two limitations and propose a 3D edge mapping that is simpler, more efficient, and preserves accuracy. Our method learns explicitly the 3D edge points and their edge direction hence bypassing the need for point sampling. It casts a 3D edge point as the center of a 3D Gaussian and the edge direction as the principal axis of the Gaussian. Such a representation has the advantage of being not only geometrically meaningful but also compatible with the efficient training optimization defined in Gaussian Splatting. Results show that the proposed method produces edges as accurate and complete as the state-of-the-art while being an order of magnitude faster. Code is released at https://github.com/kunalchelani/EdgeGaussians.

DSplats: 3D Generation by Denoising Splats-Based Multiview Diffusion Models

Generating high-quality 3D content requires models capable of learning robust distributions of complex scenes and the real-world objects within them. Recent Gaussian-based 3D reconstruction techniques have achieved impressive results in recovering high-fidelity 3D assets from sparse input images by predicting 3D Gaussians in a feed-forward manner. However, these techniques often lack the extensive priors and expressiveness offered by Diffusion Models. On the other hand, 2D Diffusion Models, which have been successfully applied to denoise multiview images, show potential for generating a wide range of photorealistic 3D outputs but still fall short on explicit 3D priors and consistency. In this work, we aim to bridge these two approaches by introducing DSplats, a novel method that directly denoises multiview images using Gaussian Splat-based Reconstructors to produce a diverse array of realistic 3D assets. To harness the extensive priors of 2D Diffusion Models, we incorporate a pretrained Latent Diffusion Model into the reconstructor backbone to predict a set of 3D Gaussians. Additionally, the explicit 3D representation embedded in the denoising network provides a strong inductive bias, ensuring geometrically consistent novel view generation. Our qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that DSplats not only produces high-quality, spatially consistent outputs, but also sets a new standard in single-image to 3D reconstruction. When evaluated on the Google Scanned Objects dataset, DSplats achieves a PSNR of 20.38, an SSIM of 0.842, and an LPIPS of 0.109.

Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in capturing complex 3D scenes with high fidelity. However, one persistent challenge that hinders the widespread adoption of NeRFs is the computational bottleneck due to the volumetric rendering. On the other hand, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussisan-based representation and adopts the rasterization pipeline to render the images rather than volumetric rendering, achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. However, a significant drawback arises as 3DGS entails a substantial number of 3D Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images, which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue, we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes, such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end, we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition, we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally, we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric attributes of Gaussian by vector quantization. In our extensive experiments, we consistently show over 10times reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed, while maintaining the quality of the scene representation, compared to 3DGS. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation, achieving high performance, fast training, compactness, and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.

GaussianProperty: Integrating Physical Properties to 3D Gaussians with LMMs

Estimating physical properties for visual data is a crucial task in computer vision, graphics, and robotics, underpinning applications such as augmented reality, physical simulation, and robotic grasping. However, this area remains under-explored due to the inherent ambiguities in physical property estimation. To address these challenges, we introduce GaussianProperty, a training-free framework that assigns physical properties of materials to 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we integrate the segmentation capability of SAM with the recognition capability of GPT-4V(ision) to formulate a global-local physical property reasoning module for 2D images. Then we project the physical properties from multi-view 2D images to 3D Gaussians using a voting strategy. We demonstrate that 3D Gaussians with physical property annotations enable applications in physics-based dynamic simulation and robotic grasping. For physics-based dynamic simulation, we leverage the Material Point Method (MPM) for realistic dynamic simulation. For robot grasping, we develop a grasping force prediction strategy that estimates a safe force range required for object grasping based on the estimated physical properties. Extensive experiments on material segmentation, physics-based dynamic simulation, and robotic grasping validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, highlighting its crucial role in understanding physical properties from visual data. Online demo, code, more cases and annotated datasets are available on https://Gaussian-Property.github.io{this https URL}.

Triplane Meets Gaussian Splatting: Fast and Generalizable Single-View 3D Reconstruction with Transformers

Recent advancements in 3D reconstruction from single images have been driven by the evolution of generative models. Prominent among these are methods based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and the adaptation of diffusion models in the 3D domain. Despite their progress, these techniques often face limitations due to slow optimization or rendering processes, leading to extensive training and optimization times. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for single-view reconstruction that efficiently generates a 3D model from a single image via feed-forward inference. Our method utilizes two transformer-based networks, namely a point decoder and a triplane decoder, to reconstruct 3D objects using a hybrid Triplane-Gaussian intermediate representation. This hybrid representation strikes a balance, achieving a faster rendering speed compared to implicit representations while simultaneously delivering superior rendering quality than explicit representations. The point decoder is designed for generating point clouds from single images, offering an explicit representation which is then utilized by the triplane decoder to query Gaussian features for each point. This design choice addresses the challenges associated with directly regressing explicit 3D Gaussian attributes characterized by their non-structural nature. Subsequently, the 3D Gaussians are decoded by an MLP to enable rapid rendering through splatting. Both decoders are built upon a scalable, transformer-based architecture and have been efficiently trained on large-scale 3D datasets. The evaluations conducted on both synthetic datasets and real-world images demonstrate that our method not only achieves higher quality but also ensures a faster runtime in comparison to previous state-of-the-art techniques. Please see our project page at https://zouzx.github.io/TriplaneGaussian/.

Analytic-Splatting: Anti-Aliased 3D Gaussian Splatting via Analytic Integration

The 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) gained its popularity recently by combining the advantages of both primitive-based and volumetric 3D representations, resulting in improved quality and efficiency for 3D scene rendering. However, 3DGS is not alias-free, and its rendering at varying resolutions could produce severe blurring or jaggies. This is because 3DGS treats each pixel as an isolated, single point rather than as an area, causing insensitivity to changes in the footprints of pixels. Consequently, this discrete sampling scheme inevitably results in aliasing, owing to the restricted sampling bandwidth. In this paper, we derive an analytical solution to address this issue. More specifically, we use a conditioned logistic function as the analytic approximation of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) in a one-dimensional Gaussian signal and calculate the Gaussian integral by subtracting the CDFs. We then introduce this approximation in the two-dimensional pixel shading, and present Analytic-Splatting, which analytically approximates the Gaussian integral within the 2D-pixel window area to better capture the intensity response of each pixel. Moreover, we use the approximated response of the pixel window integral area to participate in the transmittance calculation of volume rendering, making Analytic-Splatting sensitive to the changes in pixel footprint at different resolutions. Experiments on various datasets validate that our approach has better anti-aliasing capability that gives more details and better fidelity.

Gaussian Splatting with Discretized SDF for Relightable Assets

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has shown its detailed expressive ability and highly efficient rendering speed in the novel view synthesis (NVS) task. The application to inverse rendering still faces several challenges, as the discrete nature of Gaussian primitives makes it difficult to apply geometry constraints. Recent works introduce the signed distance field (SDF) as an extra continuous representation to regularize the geometry defined by Gaussian primitives. It improves the decomposition quality, at the cost of increasing memory usage and complicating training. Unlike these works, we introduce a discretized SDF to represent the continuous SDF in a discrete manner by encoding it within each Gaussian using a sampled value. This approach allows us to link the SDF with the Gaussian opacity through an SDF-to-opacity transformation, enabling rendering the SDF via splatting and avoiding the computational cost of ray marching.The key challenge is to regularize the discrete samples to be consistent with the underlying SDF, as the discrete representation can hardly apply the gradient-based constraints (\eg Eikonal loss). For this, we project Gaussians onto the zero-level set of SDF and enforce alignment with the surface from splatting, namely a projection-based consistency loss. Thanks to the discretized SDF, our method achieves higher relighting quality, while requiring no extra memory beyond GS and avoiding complex manually designed optimization. The experiments reveal that our method outperforms existing Gaussian-based inverse rendering methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/NK-CS-ZZL/DiscretizedSDF.

Gaussian-Flow: 4D Reconstruction with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Particle

We introduce Gaussian-Flow, a novel point-based approach for fast dynamic scene reconstruction and real-time rendering from both multi-view and monocular videos. In contrast to the prevalent NeRF-based approaches hampered by slow training and rendering speeds, our approach harnesses recent advancements in point-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, a novel Dual-Domain Deformation Model (DDDM) is proposed to explicitly model attribute deformations of each Gaussian point, where the time-dependent residual of each attribute is captured by a polynomial fitting in the time domain, and a Fourier series fitting in the frequency domain. The proposed DDDM is capable of modeling complex scene deformations across long video footage, eliminating the need for training separate 3DGS for each frame or introducing an additional implicit neural field to model 3D dynamics. Moreover, the explicit deformation modeling for discretized Gaussian points ensures ultra-fast training and rendering of a 4D scene, which is comparable to the original 3DGS designed for static 3D reconstruction. Our proposed approach showcases a substantial efficiency improvement, achieving a 5times faster training speed compared to the per-frame 3DGS modeling. In addition, quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed Gaussian-Flow significantly outperforms previous leading methods in novel view rendering quality. Project page: https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Gaussian-Flow

TCLC-GS: Tightly Coupled LiDAR-Camera Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving

Most 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) based methods for urban scenes initialize 3D Gaussians directly with 3D LiDAR points, which not only underutilizes LiDAR data capabilities but also overlooks the potential advantages of fusing LiDAR with camera data. In this paper, we design a novel tightly coupled LiDAR-Camera Gaussian Splatting (TCLC-GS) to fully leverage the combined strengths of both LiDAR and camera sensors, enabling rapid, high-quality 3D reconstruction and novel view RGB/depth synthesis. TCLC-GS designs a hybrid explicit (colorized 3D mesh) and implicit (hierarchical octree feature) 3D representation derived from LiDAR-camera data, to enrich the properties of 3D Gaussians for splatting. 3D Gaussian's properties are not only initialized in alignment with the 3D mesh which provides more completed 3D shape and color information, but are also endowed with broader contextual information through retrieved octree implicit features. During the Gaussian Splatting optimization process, the 3D mesh offers dense depth information as supervision, which enhances the training process by learning of a robust geometry. Comprehensive evaluations conducted on the Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes Dataset validate our method's state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Utilizing a single NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti, our method demonstrates fast training and achieves real-time RGB and depth rendering at 90 FPS in resolution of 1920x1280 (Waymo), and 120 FPS in resolution of 1600x900 (nuScenes) in urban scenarios.

Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting for Static and Dynamic Radiance Fields

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussian-based representation and introduces an approximated volumetric rendering, achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. Furthermore, subsequent studies have successfully extended 3DGS to dynamic 3D scenes, demonstrating its wide range of applications. However, a significant drawback arises as 3DGS and its following methods entail a substantial number of Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images, which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue, we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes, such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end, we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition, we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally, we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric and temporal attributes by residual vector quantization. With model compression techniques such as quantization and entropy coding, we consistently show over 25x reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed compared to 3DGS for static scenes, while maintaining the quality of the scene representation. For dynamic scenes, our approach achieves more than 12x storage efficiency and retains a high-quality reconstruction compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation, achieving high performance, fast training, compactness, and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.

3D Gaussian Editing with A Single Image

The modeling and manipulation of 3D scenes captured from the real world are pivotal in various applications, attracting growing research interest. While previous works on editing have achieved interesting results through manipulating 3D meshes, they often require accurately reconstructed meshes to perform editing, which limits their application in 3D content generation. To address this gap, we introduce a novel single-image-driven 3D scene editing approach based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, enabling intuitive manipulation via directly editing the content on a 2D image plane. Our method learns to optimize the 3D Gaussians to align with an edited version of the image rendered from a user-specified viewpoint of the original scene. To capture long-range object deformation, we introduce positional loss into the optimization process of 3D Gaussian Splatting and enable gradient propagation through reparameterization. To handle occluded 3D Gaussians when rendering from the specified viewpoint, we build an anchor-based structure and employ a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy capable of handling long-range deformation while maintaining structural stability. Furthermore, we design a novel masking strategy to adaptively identify non-rigid deformation regions for fine-scale modeling. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method in handling geometric details, long-range, and non-rigid deformation, demonstrating superior editing flexibility and quality compared to previous approaches.

UVGS: Reimagining Unstructured 3D Gaussian Splatting using UV Mapping

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated superior quality in modeling 3D objects and scenes. However, generating 3DGS remains challenging due to their discrete, unstructured, and permutation-invariant nature. In this work, we present a simple yet effective method to overcome these challenges. We utilize spherical mapping to transform 3DGS into a structured 2D representation, termed UVGS. UVGS can be viewed as multi-channel images, with feature dimensions as a concatenation of Gaussian attributes such as position, scale, color, opacity, and rotation. We further find that these heterogeneous features can be compressed into a lower-dimensional (e.g., 3-channel) shared feature space using a carefully designed multi-branch network. The compressed UVGS can be treated as typical RGB images. Remarkably, we discover that typical VAEs trained with latent diffusion models can directly generalize to this new representation without additional training. Our novel representation makes it effortless to leverage foundational 2D models, such as diffusion models, to directly model 3DGS. Additionally, one can simply increase the 2D UV resolution to accommodate more Gaussians, making UVGS a scalable solution compared to typical 3D backbones. This approach immediately unlocks various novel generation applications of 3DGS by inherently utilizing the already developed superior 2D generation capabilities. In our experiments, we demonstrate various unconditional, conditional generation, and inpainting applications of 3DGS based on diffusion models, which were previously non-trivial.

NPGA: Neural Parametric Gaussian Avatars

The creation of high-fidelity, digital versions of human heads is an important stepping stone in the process of further integrating virtual components into our everyday lives. Constructing such avatars is a challenging research problem, due to a high demand for photo-realism and real-time rendering performance. In this work, we propose Neural Parametric Gaussian Avatars (NPGA), a data-driven approach to create high-fidelity, controllable avatars from multi-view video recordings. We build our method around 3D Gaussian Splatting for its highly efficient rendering and to inherit the topological flexibility of point clouds. In contrast to previous work, we condition our avatars' dynamics on the rich expression space of neural parametric head models (NPHM), instead of mesh-based 3DMMs. To this end, we distill the backward deformation field of our underlying NPHM into forward deformations which are compatible with rasterization-based rendering. All remaining fine-scale, expression-dependent details are learned from the multi-view videos. To increase the representational capacity of our avatars, we augment the canonical Gaussian point cloud using per-primitive latent features which govern its dynamic behavior. To regularize this increased dynamic expressivity, we propose Laplacian terms on the latent features and predicted dynamics. We evaluate our method on the public NeRSemble dataset, demonstrating that NPGA significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art avatars on the self-reenactment task by 2.6 PSNR. Furthermore, we demonstrate accurate animation capabilities from real-world monocular videos.

ShapeSplat: A Large-scale Dataset of Gaussian Splats and Their Self-Supervised Pretraining

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the de facto method of 3D representation in many vision tasks. This calls for the 3D understanding directly in this representation space. To facilitate the research in this direction, we first build a large-scale dataset of 3DGS using the commonly used ShapeNet and ModelNet datasets. Our dataset ShapeSplat consists of 65K objects from 87 unique categories, whose labels are in accordance with the respective datasets. The creation of this dataset utilized the compute equivalent of 2 GPU years on a TITAN XP GPU. We utilize our dataset for unsupervised pretraining and supervised finetuning for classification and segmentation tasks. To this end, we introduce \textit{Gaussian-MAE}, which highlights the unique benefits of representation learning from Gaussian parameters. Through exhaustive experiments, we provide several valuable insights. In particular, we show that (1) the distribution of the optimized GS centroids significantly differs from the uniformly sampled point cloud (used for initialization) counterpart; (2) this change in distribution results in degradation in classification but improvement in segmentation tasks when using only the centroids; (3) to leverage additional Gaussian parameters, we propose Gaussian feature grouping in a normalized feature space, along with splats pooling layer, offering a tailored solution to effectively group and embed similar Gaussians, which leads to notable improvement in finetuning tasks.

Gaussian Head & Shoulders: High Fidelity Neural Upper Body Avatars with Anchor Gaussian Guided Texture Warping

By equipping the most recent 3D Gaussian Splatting representation with head 3D morphable models (3DMM), existing methods manage to create head avatars with high fidelity. However, most existing methods only reconstruct a head without the body, substantially limiting their application scenarios. We found that naively applying Gaussians to model the clothed chest and shoulders tends to result in blurry reconstruction and noisy floaters under novel poses. This is because of the fundamental limitation of Gaussians and point clouds -- each Gaussian or point can only have a single directional radiance without spatial variance, therefore an unnecessarily large number of them is required to represent complicated spatially varying texture, even for simple geometry. In contrast, we propose to model the body part with a neural texture that consists of coarse and pose-dependent fine colors. To properly render the body texture for each view and pose without accurate geometry nor UV mapping, we optimize another sparse set of Gaussians as anchors that constrain the neural warping field that maps image plane coordinates to the texture space. We demonstrate that Gaussian Head & Shoulders can fit the high-frequency details on the clothed upper body with high fidelity and potentially improve the accuracy and fidelity of the head region. We evaluate our method with casual phone-captured and internet videos and show our method archives superior reconstruction quality and robustness in both self and cross reenactment tasks. To fully utilize the efficient rendering speed of Gaussian splatting, we additionally propose an accelerated inference method of our trained model without Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) queries and reach a stable rendering speed of around 130 FPS for any subjects.

A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian splatting (GS) has recently emerged as a transformative technique in the realm of explicit radiance field and computer graphics. This innovative approach, characterized by the utilization of millions of learnable 3D Gaussians, represents a significant departure from mainstream neural radiance field approaches, which predominantly use implicit, coordinate-based models to map spatial coordinates to pixel values. 3D GS, with its explicit scene representation and differentiable rendering algorithm, not only promises real-time rendering capability but also introduces unprecedented levels of editability. This positions 3D GS as a potential game-changer for the next generation of 3D reconstruction and representation. In the present paper, we provide the first systematic overview of the recent developments and critical contributions in the domain of 3D GS. We begin with a detailed exploration of the underlying principles and the driving forces behind the emergence of 3D GS, laying the groundwork for understanding its significance. A focal point of our discussion is the practical applicability of 3D GS. By enabling unprecedented rendering speed, 3D GS opens up a plethora of applications, ranging from virtual reality to interactive media and beyond. This is complemented by a comparative analysis of leading 3D GS models, evaluated across various benchmark tasks to highlight their performance and practical utility. The survey concludes by identifying current challenges and suggesting potential avenues for future research in this domain. Through this survey, we aim to provide a valuable resource for both newcomers and seasoned researchers, fostering further exploration and advancement in applicable and explicit radiance field representation.

Deblurring 3D Gaussian Splatting

Recent studies in Radiance Fields have paved the robust way for novel view synthesis with their photorealistic rendering quality. Nevertheless, they usually employ neural networks and volumetric rendering, which are costly to train and impede their broad use in various real-time applications due to the lengthy rendering time. Lately 3D Gaussians splatting-based approach has been proposed to model the 3D scene, and it achieves remarkable visual quality while rendering the images in real-time. However, it suffers from severe degradation in the rendering quality if the training images are blurry. Blurriness commonly occurs due to the lens defocusing, object motion, and camera shake, and it inevitably intervenes in clean image acquisition. Several previous studies have attempted to render clean and sharp images from blurry input images using neural fields. The majority of those works, however, are designed only for volumetric rendering-based neural radiance fields and are not straightforwardly applicable to rasterization-based 3D Gaussian splatting methods. Thus, we propose a novel real-time deblurring framework, deblurring 3D Gaussian Splatting, using a small Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) that manipulates the covariance of each 3D Gaussian to model the scene blurriness. While deblurring 3D Gaussian Splatting can still enjoy real-time rendering, it can reconstruct fine and sharp details from blurry images. A variety of experiments have been conducted on the benchmark, and the results have revealed the effectiveness of our approach for deblurring. Qualitative results are available at https://benhenryl.github.io/Deblurring-3D-Gaussian-Splatting/

Surface Reconstruction from Gaussian Splatting via Novel Stereo Views

The Gaussian splatting for radiance field rendering method has recently emerged as an efficient approach for accurate scene representation. It optimizes the location, size, color, and shape of a cloud of 3D Gaussian elements to visually match, after projection, or splatting, a set of given images taken from various viewing directions. And yet, despite the proximity of Gaussian elements to the shape boundaries, direct surface reconstruction of objects in the scene is a challenge. We propose a novel approach for surface reconstruction from Gaussian splatting models. Rather than relying on the Gaussian elements' locations as a prior for surface reconstruction, we leverage the superior novel-view synthesis capabilities of 3DGS. To that end, we use the Gaussian splatting model to render pairs of stereo-calibrated novel views from which we extract depth profiles using a stereo matching method. We then combine the extracted RGB-D images into a geometrically consistent surface. The resulting reconstruction is more accurate and shows finer details when compared to other methods for surface reconstruction from Gaussian splatting models, while requiring significantly less compute time compared to other surface reconstruction methods. We performed extensive testing of the proposed method on in-the-wild scenes, taken by a smartphone, showcasing its superior reconstruction abilities. Additionally, we tested the proposed method on the Tanks and Temples benchmark, and it has surpassed the current leading method for surface reconstruction from Gaussian splatting models. Project page: https://gs2mesh.github.io/.

Unposed 3DGS Reconstruction with Probabilistic Procrustes Mapping

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a core technique for 3D representation. Its effectiveness largely depends on precise camera poses and accurate point cloud initialization, which are often derived from pretrained Multi-View Stereo (MVS) models. However, in unposed reconstruction task from hundreds of outdoor images, existing MVS models may struggle with memory limits and lose accuracy as the number of input images grows. To address this limitation, we propose a novel unposed 3DGS reconstruction framework that integrates pretrained MVS priors with the probabilistic Procrustes mapping strategy. The method partitions input images into subsets, maps submaps into a global space, and jointly optimizes geometry and poses with 3DGS. Technically, we formulate the mapping of tens of millions of point clouds as a probabilistic Procrustes problem and solve a closed-form alignment. By employing probabilistic coupling along with a soft dustbin mechanism to reject uncertain correspondences, our method globally aligns point clouds and poses within minutes across hundreds of images. Moreover, we propose a joint optimization framework for 3DGS and camera poses. It constructs Gaussians from confidence-aware anchor points and integrates 3DGS differentiable rendering with an analytical Jacobian to jointly refine scene and poses, enabling accurate reconstruction and pose estimation. Experiments on Waymo and KITTI datasets show that our method achieves accurate reconstruction from unposed image sequences, setting a new state of the art for unposed 3DGS reconstruction.

Optimized Minimal 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for real-time, high-performance rendering, enabling a wide range of applications. However, representing 3D scenes with numerous explicit Gaussian primitives imposes significant storage and memory overhead. Recent studies have shown that high-quality rendering can be achieved with a substantially reduced number of Gaussians when represented with high-precision attributes. Nevertheless, existing 3DGS compression methods still rely on a relatively large number of Gaussians, focusing primarily on attribute compression. This is because a smaller set of Gaussians becomes increasingly sensitive to lossy attribute compression, leading to severe quality degradation. Since the number of Gaussians is directly tied to computational costs, it is essential to reduce the number of Gaussians effectively rather than only optimizing storage. In this paper, we propose Optimized Minimal Gaussians representation (OMG), which significantly reduces storage while using a minimal number of primitives. First, we determine the distinct Gaussian from the near ones, minimizing redundancy without sacrificing quality. Second, we propose a compact and precise attribute representation that efficiently captures both continuity and irregularity among primitives. Additionally, we propose a sub-vector quantization technique for improved irregularity representation, maintaining fast training with a negligible codebook size. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OMG reduces storage requirements by nearly 50% compared to the previous state-of-the-art and enables 600+ FPS rendering while maintaining high rendering quality. Our source code is available at https://maincold2.github.io/omg/.

StreamGS: Online Generalizable Gaussian Splatting Reconstruction for Unposed Image Streams

The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has advanced 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. With the growing interest of interactive applications that need immediate feedback, online 3DGS reconstruction in real-time is in high demand. However, none of existing methods yet meet the demand due to three main challenges: the absence of predetermined camera parameters, the need for generalizable 3DGS optimization, and the necessity of reducing redundancy. We propose StreamGS, an online generalizable 3DGS reconstruction method for unposed image streams, which progressively transform image streams to 3D Gaussian streams by predicting and aggregating per-frame Gaussians. Our method overcomes the limitation of the initial point reconstruction dust3r in tackling out-of-domain (OOD) issues by introducing a content adaptive refinement. The refinement enhances cross-frame consistency by establishing reliable pixel correspondences between adjacent frames. Such correspondences further aid in merging redundant Gaussians through cross-frame feature aggregation. The density of Gaussians is thereby reduced, empowering online reconstruction by significantly lowering computational and memory costs. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets have demonstrated that StreamGS achieves quality on par with optimization-based approaches but does so 150 times faster, and exhibits superior generalizability in handling OOD scenes.

Dynamic 3D Gaussian Tracking for Graph-Based Neural Dynamics Modeling

Videos of robots interacting with objects encode rich information about the objects' dynamics. However, existing video prediction approaches typically do not explicitly account for the 3D information from videos, such as robot actions and objects' 3D states, limiting their use in real-world robotic applications. In this work, we introduce a framework to learn object dynamics directly from multi-view RGB videos by explicitly considering the robot's action trajectories and their effects on scene dynamics. We utilize the 3D Gaussian representation of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to train a particle-based dynamics model using Graph Neural Networks. This model operates on sparse control particles downsampled from the densely tracked 3D Gaussian reconstructions. By learning the neural dynamics model on offline robot interaction data, our method can predict object motions under varying initial configurations and unseen robot actions. The 3D transformations of Gaussians can be interpolated from the motions of control particles, enabling the rendering of predicted future object states and achieving action-conditioned video prediction. The dynamics model can also be applied to model-based planning frameworks for object manipulation tasks. We conduct experiments on various kinds of deformable materials, including ropes, clothes, and stuffed animals, demonstrating our framework's ability to model complex shapes and dynamics. Our project page is available at https://gs-dynamics.github.io.

BrightDreamer: Generic 3D Gaussian Generative Framework for Fast Text-to-3D Synthesis

Text-to-3D synthesis has recently seen intriguing advances by combining the text-to-image models with 3D representation methods, e.g., Gaussian Splatting (GS), via Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). However, a hurdle of existing methods is the low efficiency, per-prompt optimization for a single 3D object. Therefore, it is imperative for a paradigm shift from per-prompt optimization to one-stage generation for any unseen text prompts, which yet remains challenging. A hurdle is how to directly generate a set of millions of 3D Gaussians to represent a 3D object. This paper presents BrightDreamer, an end-to-end single-stage approach that can achieve generalizable and fast (77 ms) text-to-3D generation. Our key idea is to formulate the generation process as estimating the 3D deformation from an anchor shape with predefined positions. For this, we first propose a Text-guided Shape Deformation (TSD) network to predict the deformed shape and its new positions, used as the centers (one attribute) of 3D Gaussians. To estimate the other four attributes (i.e., scaling, rotation, opacity, and SH coefficient), we then design a novel Text-guided Triplane Generator (TTG) to generate a triplane representation for a 3D object. The center of each Gaussian enables us to transform the triplane feature into the four attributes. The generated 3D Gaussians can be finally rendered at 705 frames per second. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing methods. Also, BrightDreamer possesses a strong semantic understanding capability even for complex text prompts. The project code is available at https://vlislab22.github.io/BrightDreamer.

GAvatar: Animatable 3D Gaussian Avatars with Implicit Mesh Learning

Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful 3D representation that harnesses the advantages of both explicit (mesh) and implicit (NeRF) 3D representations. In this paper, we seek to leverage Gaussian splatting to generate realistic animatable avatars from textual descriptions, addressing the limitations (e.g., flexibility and efficiency) imposed by mesh or NeRF-based representations. However, a naive application of Gaussian splatting cannot generate high-quality animatable avatars and suffers from learning instability; it also cannot capture fine avatar geometries and often leads to degenerate body parts. To tackle these problems, we first propose a primitive-based 3D Gaussian representation where Gaussians are defined inside pose-driven primitives to facilitate animation. Second, to stabilize and amortize the learning of millions of Gaussians, we propose to use neural implicit fields to predict the Gaussian attributes (e.g., colors). Finally, to capture fine avatar geometries and extract detailed meshes, we propose a novel SDF-based implicit mesh learning approach for 3D Gaussians that regularizes the underlying geometries and extracts highly detailed textured meshes. Our proposed method, GAvatar, enables the large-scale generation of diverse animatable avatars using only text prompts. GAvatar significantly surpasses existing methods in terms of both appearance and geometry quality, and achieves extremely fast rendering (100 fps) at 1K resolution.

GaussianObject: Just Taking Four Images to Get A High-Quality 3D Object with Gaussian Splatting

Reconstructing and rendering 3D objects from highly sparse views is of critical importance for promoting applications of 3D vision techniques and improving user experience. However, images from sparse views only contain very limited 3D information, leading to two significant challenges: 1) Difficulty in building multi-view consistency as images for matching are too few; 2) Partially omitted or highly compressed object information as view coverage is insufficient. To tackle these challenges, we propose GaussianObject, a framework to represent and render the 3D object with Gaussian splatting, that achieves high rendering quality with only 4 input images. We first introduce techniques of visual hull and floater elimination which explicitly inject structure priors into the initial optimization process for helping build multi-view consistency, yielding a coarse 3D Gaussian representation. Then we construct a Gaussian repair model based on diffusion models to supplement the omitted object information, where Gaussians are further refined. We design a self-generating strategy to obtain image pairs for training the repair model. Our GaussianObject is evaluated on several challenging datasets, including MipNeRF360, OmniObject3D, and OpenIllumination, achieving strong reconstruction results from only 4 views and significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods.

Compression in 3D Gaussian Splatting: A Survey of Methods, Trends, and Future Directions

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a pioneering approach in explicit scene rendering and computer graphics. Unlike traditional neural radiance field (NeRF) methods, which typically rely on implicit, coordinate-based models to map spatial coordinates to pixel values, 3DGS utilizes millions of learnable 3D Gaussians. Its differentiable rendering technique and inherent capability for explicit scene representation and manipulation positions 3DGS as a potential game-changer for the next generation of 3D reconstruction and representation technologies. This enables 3DGS to deliver real-time rendering speeds while offering unparalleled editability levels. However, despite its advantages, 3DGS suffers from substantial memory and storage requirements, posing challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview focusing on the scalability and compression of 3DGS. We begin with a detailed background overview of 3DGS, followed by a structured taxonomy of existing compression methods. Additionally, we analyze and compare current methods from the topological perspective, evaluating their strengths and limitations in terms of fidelity, compression ratios, and computational efficiency. Furthermore, we explore how advancements in efficient NeRF representations can inspire future developments in 3DGS optimization. Finally, we conclude with current research challenges and highlight key directions for future exploration.

LM-Gaussian: Boost Sparse-view 3D Gaussian Splatting with Large Model Priors

We aim to address sparse-view reconstruction of a 3D scene by leveraging priors from large-scale vision models. While recent advancements such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated remarkable successes in 3D reconstruction, these methods typically necessitate hundreds of input images that densely capture the underlying scene, making them time-consuming and impractical for real-world applications. However, sparse-view reconstruction is inherently ill-posed and under-constrained, often resulting in inferior and incomplete outcomes. This is due to issues such as failed initialization, overfitting on input images, and a lack of details. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce LM-Gaussian, a method capable of generating high-quality reconstructions from a limited number of images. Specifically, we propose a robust initialization module that leverages stereo priors to aid in the recovery of camera poses and the reliable point clouds. Additionally, a diffusion-based refinement is iteratively applied to incorporate image diffusion priors into the Gaussian optimization process to preserve intricate scene details. Finally, we utilize video diffusion priors to further enhance the rendered images for realistic visual effects. Overall, our approach significantly reduces the data acquisition requirements compared to previous 3DGS methods. We validate the effectiveness of our framework through experiments on various public datasets, demonstrating its potential for high-quality 360-degree scene reconstruction. Visual results are on our website.

Bridging 3D Gaussian and Mesh for Freeview Video Rendering

This is only a preview version of GauMesh. Recently, primitive-based rendering has been proven to achieve convincing results in solving the problem of modeling and rendering the 3D dynamic scene from 2D images. Despite this, in the context of novel view synthesis, each type of primitive has its inherent defects in terms of representation ability. It is difficult to exploit the mesh to depict the fuzzy geometry. Meanwhile, the point-based splatting (e.g. the 3D Gaussian Splatting) method usually produces artifacts or blurry pixels in the area with smooth geometry and sharp textures. As a result, it is difficult, even not impossible, to represent the complex and dynamic scene with a single type of primitive. To this end, we propose a novel approach, GauMesh, to bridge the 3D Gaussian and Mesh for modeling and rendering the dynamic scenes. Given a sequence of tracked mesh as initialization, our goal is to simultaneously optimize the mesh geometry, color texture, opacity maps, a set of 3D Gaussians, and the deformation field. At a specific time, we perform alpha-blending on the RGB and opacity values based on the merged and re-ordered z-buffers from mesh and 3D Gaussian rasterizations. This produces the final rendering, which is supervised by the ground-truth image. Experiments demonstrate that our approach adapts the appropriate type of primitives to represent the different parts of the dynamic scene and outperforms all the baseline methods in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons without losing render speed.

MeshGS: Adaptive Mesh-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for High-Quality Rendering

Recently, 3D Gaussian splatting has gained attention for its capability to generate high-fidelity rendering results. At the same time, most applications such as games, animation, and AR/VR use mesh-based representations to represent and render 3D scenes. We propose a novel approach that integrates mesh representation with 3D Gaussian splats to perform high-quality rendering of reconstructed real-world scenes. In particular, we introduce a distance-based Gaussian splatting technique to align the Gaussian splats with the mesh surface and remove redundant Gaussian splats that do not contribute to the rendering. We consider the distance between each Gaussian splat and the mesh surface to distinguish between tightly-bound and loosely-bound Gaussian splats. The tightly-bound splats are flattened and aligned well with the mesh geometry. The loosely-bound Gaussian splats are used to account for the artifacts in reconstructed 3D meshes in terms of rendering. We present a training strategy of binding Gaussian splats to the mesh geometry, and take into account both types of splats. In this context, we introduce several regularization techniques aimed at precisely aligning tightly-bound Gaussian splats with the mesh surface during the training process. We validate the effectiveness of our method on large and unbounded scene from mip-NeRF 360 and Deep Blending datasets. Our method surpasses recent mesh-based neural rendering techniques by achieving a 2dB higher PSNR, and outperforms mesh-based Gaussian splatting methods by 1.3 dB PSNR, particularly on the outdoor mip-NeRF 360 dataset, demonstrating better rendering quality. We provide analyses for each type of Gaussian splat and achieve a reduction in the number of Gaussian splats by 30% compared to the original 3D Gaussian splatting.

Turbo-GS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Fitting for High-Quality Radiance Fields

Novel-view synthesis is an important problem in computer vision with applications in 3D reconstruction, mixed reality, and robotics. Recent methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have become the preferred method for this task, providing high-quality novel views in real time. However, the training time of a 3DGS model is slow, often taking 30 minutes for a scene with 200 views. In contrast, our goal is to reduce the optimization time by training for fewer steps while maintaining high rendering quality. Specifically, we combine the guidance from both the position error and the appearance error to achieve a more effective densification. To balance the rate between adding new Gaussians and fitting old Gaussians, we develop a convergence-aware budget control mechanism. Moreover, to make the densification process more reliable, we selectively add new Gaussians from mostly visited regions. With these designs, we reduce the Gaussian optimization steps to one-third of the previous approach while achieving a comparable or even better novel view rendering quality. To further facilitate the rapid fitting of 4K resolution images, we introduce a dilation-based rendering technique. Our method, Turbo-GS, speeds up optimization for typical scenes and scales well to high-resolution (4K) scenarios on standard datasets. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method is significantly faster in optimization than other methods while retaining quality. Project page: https://ivl.cs.brown.edu/research/turbo-gs.

Implicit Gaussian process representation of vector fields over arbitrary latent manifolds

Gaussian processes (GPs) are popular nonparametric statistical models for learning unknown functions and quantifying the spatiotemporal uncertainty in data. Recent works have extended GPs to model scalar and vector quantities distributed over non-Euclidean domains, including smooth manifolds appearing in numerous fields such as computer vision, dynamical systems, and neuroscience. However, these approaches assume that the manifold underlying the data is known, limiting their practical utility. We introduce RVGP, a generalisation of GPs for learning vector signals over latent Riemannian manifolds. Our method uses positional encoding with eigenfunctions of the connection Laplacian, associated with the tangent bundle, readily derived from common graph-based approximation of data. We demonstrate that RVGP possesses global regularity over the manifold, which allows it to super-resolve and inpaint vector fields while preserving singularities. Furthermore, we use RVGP to reconstruct high-density neural dynamics derived from low-density EEG recordings in healthy individuals and Alzheimer's patients. We show that vector field singularities are important disease markers and that their reconstruction leads to a comparable classification accuracy of disease states to high-density recordings. Thus, our method overcomes a significant practical limitation in experimental and clinical applications.

GS-ROR^2: Bidirectional-guided 3DGS and SDF for Reflective Object Relighting and Reconstruction

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown a powerful capability for novel view synthesis due to its detailed expressive ability and highly efficient rendering speed. Unfortunately, creating relightable 3D assets and reconstructing faithful geometry with 3DGS is still problematic, particularly for reflective objects, as its discontinuous representation raises difficulties in constraining geometries. Volumetric signed distance field (SDF) methods provide robust geometry reconstruction, while the expensive ray marching hinders its real-time application and slows the training. Besides, these methods struggle to capture sharp geometric details. To this end, we propose to guide 3DGS and SDF bidirectionally in a complementary manner, including an SDF-aided Gaussian splatting for efficient optimization of the relighting model and a GS-guided SDF enhancement for high-quality geometry reconstruction. At the core of our SDF-aided Gaussian splatting is the mutual supervision of the depth and normal between blended Gaussians and SDF, which avoids the expensive volume rendering of SDF. Thanks to this mutual supervision, the learned blended Gaussians are well-constrained with a minimal time cost. As the Gaussians are rendered in a deferred shading mode, the alpha-blended Gaussians are smooth, while individual Gaussians may still be outliers, yielding floater artifacts. Therefore, we introduce an SDF-aware pruning strategy to remove Gaussian outliers located distant from the surface defined by SDF, avoiding floater issue. This way, our GS framework provides reasonable normal and achieves realistic relighting, while the mesh from depth is still problematic. Therefore, we design a GS-guided SDF refinement, which utilizes the blended normal from Gaussians to finetune SDF. With this enhancement, our method can further provide high-quality meshes for reflective objects at the cost of 17% extra training time.

GES: Generalized Exponential Splatting for Efficient Radiance Field Rendering

Advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting have significantly accelerated 3D reconstruction and generation. However, it may require a large number of Gaussians, which creates a substantial memory footprint. This paper introduces GES (Generalized Exponential Splatting), a novel representation that employs Generalized Exponential Function (GEF) to model 3D scenes, requiring far fewer particles to represent a scene and thus significantly outperforming Gaussian Splatting methods in efficiency with a plug-and-play replacement ability for Gaussian-based utilities. GES is validated theoretically and empirically in both principled 1D setup and realistic 3D scenes. It is shown to represent signals with sharp edges more accurately, which are typically challenging for Gaussians due to their inherent low-pass characteristics. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that GEF outperforms Gaussians in fitting natural-occurring signals (e.g. squares, triangles, and parabolic signals), thereby reducing the need for extensive splitting operations that increase the memory footprint of Gaussian Splatting. With the aid of a frequency-modulated loss, GES achieves competitive performance in novel-view synthesis benchmarks while requiring less than half the memory storage of Gaussian Splatting and increasing the rendering speed by up to 39%. The code is available on the project website https://abdullahamdi.com/ges .

3DGS-DET: Empower 3D Gaussian Splatting with Boundary Guidance and Box-Focused Sampling for 3D Object Detection

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are widely used for novel-view synthesis and have been adapted for 3D Object Detection (3DOD), offering a promising approach to 3DOD through view-synthesis representation. However, NeRF faces inherent limitations: (i) limited representational capacity for 3DOD due to its implicit nature, and (ii) slow rendering speeds. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as an explicit 3D representation that addresses these limitations. Inspired by these advantages, this paper introduces 3DGS into 3DOD for the first time, identifying two main challenges: (i) Ambiguous spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs: 3DGS primarily relies on 2D pixel-level supervision, resulting in unclear 3D spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs and poor differentiation between objects and background, which hinders 3DOD; (ii) Excessive background blobs: 2D images often include numerous background pixels, leading to densely reconstructed 3DGS with many noisy Gaussian blobs representing the background, negatively affecting detection. To tackle the challenge (i), we leverage the fact that 3DGS reconstruction is derived from 2D images, and propose an elegant and efficient solution by incorporating 2D Boundary Guidance to significantly enhance the spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs, resulting in clearer differentiation between objects and their background. To address the challenge (ii), we propose a Box-Focused Sampling strategy using 2D boxes to generate object probability distribution in 3D spaces, allowing effective probabilistic sampling in 3D to retain more object blobs and reduce noisy background blobs. Benefiting from our designs, our 3DGS-DET significantly outperforms the SOTA NeRF-based method, NeRF-Det, achieving improvements of +6.6 on mAP@0.25 and +8.1 on mAP@0.5 for the ScanNet dataset, and impressive +31.5 on mAP@0.25 for the ARKITScenes dataset.

NeuralGS: Bridging Neural Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting for Compact 3D Representations

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) demonstrates superior quality and rendering speed, but with millions of 3D Gaussians and significant storage and transmission costs. Recent 3DGS compression methods mainly concentrate on compressing Scaffold-GS, achieving impressive performance but with an additional voxel structure and a complex encoding and quantization strategy. In this paper, we aim to develop a simple yet effective method called NeuralGS that explores in another way to compress the original 3DGS into a compact representation without the voxel structure and complex quantization strategies. Our observation is that neural fields like NeRF can represent complex 3D scenes with Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural networks using only a few megabytes. Thus, NeuralGS effectively adopts the neural field representation to encode the attributes of 3D Gaussians with MLPs, only requiring a small storage size even for a large-scale scene. To achieve this, we adopt a clustering strategy and fit the Gaussians with different tiny MLPs for each cluster, based on importance scores of Gaussians as fitting weights. We experiment on multiple datasets, achieving a 45-times average model size reduction without harming the visual quality. The compression performance of our method on original 3DGS is comparable to the dedicated Scaffold-GS-based compression methods, which demonstrate the huge potential of directly compressing original 3DGS with neural fields.

GENIE: Gaussian Encoding for Neural Radiance Fields Interactive Editing

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Gaussian Splatting (GS) have recently transformed 3D scene representation and rendering. NeRF achieves high-fidelity novel view synthesis by learning volumetric representations through neural networks, but its implicit encoding makes editing and physical interaction challenging. In contrast, GS represents scenes as explicit collections of Gaussian primitives, enabling real-time rendering, faster training, and more intuitive manipulation. This explicit structure has made GS particularly well-suited for interactive editing and integration with physics-based simulation. In this paper, we introduce GENIE (Gaussian Encoding for Neural Radiance Fields Interactive Editing), a hybrid model that combines the photorealistic rendering quality of NeRF with the editable and structured representation of GS. Instead of using spherical harmonics for appearance modeling, we assign each Gaussian a trainable feature embedding. These embeddings are used to condition a NeRF network based on the k nearest Gaussians to each query point. To make this conditioning efficient, we introduce Ray-Traced Gaussian Proximity Search (RT-GPS), a fast nearest Gaussian search based on a modified ray-tracing pipeline. We also integrate a multi-resolution hash grid to initialize and update Gaussian features. Together, these components enable real-time, locality-aware editing: as Gaussian primitives are repositioned or modified, their interpolated influence is immediately reflected in the rendered output. By combining the strengths of implicit and explicit representations, GENIE supports intuitive scene manipulation, dynamic interaction, and compatibility with physical simulation, bridging the gap between geometry-based editing and neural rendering. The code can be found under (https://github.com/MikolajZielinski/genie)

SplatFormer: Point Transformer for Robust 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently transformed photorealistic reconstruction, achieving high visual fidelity and real-time performance. However, rendering quality significantly deteriorates when test views deviate from the camera angles used during training, posing a major challenge for applications in immersive free-viewpoint rendering and navigation. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 3DGS and related novel view synthesis methods under out-of-distribution (OOD) test camera scenarios. By creating diverse test cases with synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that most existing methods, including those incorporating various regularization techniques and data-driven priors, struggle to generalize effectively to OOD views. To address this limitation, we introduce SplatFormer, the first point transformer model specifically designed to operate on Gaussian splats. SplatFormer takes as input an initial 3DGS set optimized under limited training views and refines it in a single forward pass, effectively removing potential artifacts in OOD test views. To our knowledge, this is the first successful application of point transformers directly on 3DGS sets, surpassing the limitations of previous multi-scene training methods, which could handle only a restricted number of input views during inference. Our model significantly improves rendering quality under extreme novel views, achieving state-of-the-art performance in these challenging scenarios and outperforming various 3DGS regularization techniques, multi-scene models tailored for sparse view synthesis, and diffusion-based frameworks.

Uncertainty-Aware Normal-Guided Gaussian Splatting for Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Image Sequences

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved impressive rendering performance in novel view synthesis. However, its efficacy diminishes considerably in sparse image sequences, where inherent data sparsity amplifies geometric uncertainty during optimization. This often leads to convergence at suboptimal local minima, resulting in noticeable structural artifacts in the reconstructed scenes.To mitigate these issues, we propose Uncertainty-aware Normal-Guided Gaussian Splatting (UNG-GS), a novel framework featuring an explicit Spatial Uncertainty Field (SUF) to quantify geometric uncertainty within the 3DGS pipeline. UNG-GS enables high-fidelity rendering and achieves high-precision reconstruction without relying on priors. Specifically, we first integrate Gaussian-based probabilistic modeling into the training of 3DGS to optimize the SUF, providing the model with adaptive error tolerance. An uncertainty-aware depth rendering strategy is then employed to weight depth contributions based on the SUF, effectively reducing noise while preserving fine details. Furthermore, an uncertainty-guided normal refinement method adjusts the influence of neighboring depth values in normal estimation, promoting robust results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UNG-GS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both sparse and dense sequences. The code will be open-source.