GDGS: Gradient Domain Gaussian Splatting for Sparse Representation of Radiance Fields

TL;DR

This paper introduces GDGS, a method that models the gradient of radiance fields using sparse Gaussian splats, significantly improving storage efficiency and rendering speed in 3D scene synthesis.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel gradient-based Gaussian splatting approach that leverages sparsity for more efficient 3D radiance field representation and faster rendering.

Findings

Achieves 100-1000x faster rendering performance.

Reduces storage requirements through gradient sparsity.

Effective in applications like human body and indoor scene modeling.

Abstract

The 3D Gaussian splatting methods are getting popular. However, they work directly on the signal, leading to a dense representation of the signal. Even with some techniques such as pruning or distillation, the results are still dense. In this paper, we propose to model the gradient of the original signal. The gradients are much sparser than the original signal. Therefore, the gradients use much less Gaussian splats, leading to the more efficient storage and thus higher computational performance during both training and rendering. Thanks to the sparsity, during the view synthesis, only a small mount of pixels are needed, leading to much higher computational performance ($100\sim 1000\times$ faster). And the 2D image can be recovered from the gradients via solving a Poisson equation with linear computation complexity. Several experiments are performed to confirm the sparseness of the gradients and the computation performance of the proposed method. The method can be applied various applications, such as human body modeling and indoor environment modeling.