LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS

TL;DR

LightGaussian significantly compresses 3D Gaussian representations by 15x, reducing storage and increasing rendering speed, thus enhancing real-time neural rendering scalability and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper introduces LightGaussian, a novel pruning and compression method that reduces 3D Gaussian data size while maintaining visual quality, enabling faster rendering and better scalability.

Findings

Achieves 15x compression rate on 3D Gaussian data.

Increases rendering FPS from 144 to 237.

Maintains visual quality with minimal accuracy loss.

Abstract

Recent advances in real-time neural rendering using point-based techniques have enabled broader adoption of 3D representations. However, foundational approaches like 3D Gaussian Splatting impose substantial storage overhead, as Structure-from-Motion (SfM) points can grow to millions, often requiring gigabyte-level disk space for a single unbounded scene. This growth presents scalability challenges and hinders splatting efficiency. To address this, we introduce LightGaussian, a method for transforming 3D Gaussians into a more compact format. Inspired by Network Pruning, LightGaussian identifies Gaussians with minimal global significance on scene reconstruction, and applies a pruning and recovery process to reduce redundancy while preserving visual quality. Knowledge distillation and pseudo-view augmentation then transfer spherical harmonic coefficients to a lower degree, yielding compact representations. Gaussian Vector Quantization, based on each Gaussian's global significance, further lowers bitwidth with minimal accuracy loss. LightGaussian achieves an average 15x compression rate while boosting FPS from 144 to 237 within the 3D-GS framework, enabling efficient complex scene representation on the Mip-NeRF 360 and Tank & Temple datasets. The proposed Gaussian pruning approach is also adaptable to other 3D representations (e.g., Scaffold-GS), demonstrating strong generalization capabilities.