FLoD: Integrating Flexible Level of Detail into 3D Gaussian Splatting for Customizable Rendering

TL;DR

FLoD introduces a multi-level 3D Gaussian Splatting framework that allows adjustable detail levels and memory-efficient rendering, enabling real-time visualization across diverse hardware configurations.

Contribution

FLoD is the first to incorporate a flexible level of detail into 3D Gaussian Splatting, supporting adjustable rendering quality and memory usage across different hardware setups.

Findings

Enables real-time rendering with adjustable quality and memory trade-offs.

Generalizes across various 3DGS frameworks, facilitating broader adoption.

Provides a multi-level scene reconstruction with consistent structural integrity.

Abstract

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and its subsequent works are restricted to specific hardware setups, either on only low-cost or on only high-end configurations. Approaches aimed at reducing 3DGS memory usage enable rendering on low-cost GPU but compromise rendering quality, which fails to leverage the hardware capabilities in the case of higher-end GPU. Conversely, methods that enhance rendering quality require high-end GPU with large VRAM, making such methods impractical for lower-end devices with limited memory capacity. Consequently, 3DGS-based works generally assume a single hardware setup and lack the flexibility to adapt to varying hardware constraints. To overcome this limitation, we propose Flexible Level of Detail (FLoD) for 3DGS. FLoD constructs a multi-level 3DGS representation through level-specific 3D scale constraints, where each level independently reconstructs the entire scene with varying detail and GPU memory usage. A level-by-level training strategy is introduced to ensure structural consistency across levels. Furthermore, the multi-level structure of FLoD allows selective rendering of image regions at different detail levels, providing additional memory-efficient rendering options. To our knowledge, among prior works which incorporate the concept of Level of Detail (LoD) with 3DGS, FLoD is the first to follow the core principle of LoD by offering adjustable options for a broad range of GPU settings. Experiments demonstrate that FLoD provides various rendering options with trade-offs between quality and memory usage, enabling real-time rendering under diverse memory constraints. Furthermore, we show that FLoD generalizes to different 3DGS frameworks, indicating its potential for integration into future state-of-the-art developments.