Reducing the Memory Footprint of 3D Gaussian Splatting

TL;DR

This paper introduces techniques to significantly reduce the memory footprint of 3D Gaussian splatting for view synthesis, enabling faster rendering and lower storage requirements, especially beneficial for mobile applications.

Contribution

The paper presents three novel methods: primitive pruning, adaptive coefficient selection, and quantization, to cut down memory use in 3D Gaussian splatting.

Findings

27-fold reduction in storage size

1.7 times faster rendering speed

Significant decrease in download times for mobile use

Abstract

3D Gaussian splatting provides excellent visual quality for novel view synthesis, with fast training and real-time rendering; unfortunately, the memory requirements of this method for storing and transmission are unreasonably high. We first analyze the reasons for this, identifying three main areas where storage can be reduced: the number of 3D Gaussian primitives used to represent a scene, the number of coefficients for the spherical harmonics used to represent directional radiance, and the precision required to store Gaussian primitive attributes. We present a solution to each of these issues. First, we propose an efficient, resolution-aware primitive pruning approach, reducing the primitive count by half. Second, we introduce an adaptive adjustment method to choose the number of coefficients used to represent directional radiance for each Gaussian primitive, and finally a codebook-based quantization method, together with a half-float representation for further memory reduction. Taken together, these three components result in a 27 reduction in overall size on disk on the standard datasets we tested, along with a 1.7 speedup in rendering speed. We demonstrate our method on standard datasets and show how our solution results in significantly reduced download times when using the method on a mobile device.