AdR-Gaussian: Accelerating Gaussian Splatting with Adaptive Radius

TL;DR

AdR-Gaussian significantly accelerates 3D Gaussian Splatting rendering by introducing adaptive radius-based early culling, parallel processing, and load balancing, achieving over three times faster rendering with maintained or improved quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel acceleration method for Gaussian Splatting that combines adaptive radius culling, early Gaussian-Tile pair culling, and load balancing to enhance speed and efficiency.

Findings

Achieves 310% faster rendering speed.

Maintains or improves rendering quality.

Effective in reducing unnecessary overhead.

Abstract

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a recent explicit 3D representation that has achieved high-quality reconstruction and real-time rendering of complex scenes. However, the rasterization pipeline still suffers from unnecessary overhead resulting from avoidable serial Gaussian culling, and uneven load due to the distinct number of Gaussian to be rendered across pixels, which hinders wider promotion and application of 3DGS. In order to accelerate Gaussian splatting, we propose AdR-Gaussian, which moves part of serial culling in Render stage into the earlier Preprocess stage to enable parallel culling, employing adaptive radius to narrow the rendering pixel range for each Gaussian, and introduces a load balancing method to minimize thread waiting time during the pixel-parallel rendering. Our contributions are threefold, achieving a rendering speed of 310% while maintaining equivalent or even better quality than the state-of-the-art. Firstly, we propose to early cull Gaussian-Tile pairs of low splatting opacity based on an adaptive radius in the Gaussian-parallel Preprocess stage, which reduces the number of affected tile through the Gaussian bounding circle, thus reducing unnecessary overhead and achieving faster rendering speed. Secondly, we further propose early culling based on axis-aligned bounding box for Gaussian splatting, which achieves a more significant reduction in ineffective expenses by accurately calculating the Gaussian size in the 2D directions. Thirdly, we propose a balancing algorithm for pixel thread load, which compresses the information of heavy-load pixels to reduce thread waiting time, and enhance information of light-load pixels to hedge against rendering quality loss. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our algorithm can significantly improve the Gaussian Splatting rendering speed.