3D Convex Splatting: Radiance Field Rendering with 3D Smooth Convexes

TL;DR

3D Convex Splatting introduces smooth convex primitives for scene reconstruction, outperforming Gaussian-based methods in quality and efficiency, especially in representing hard edges and flat surfaces.

Contribution

The paper proposes 3D Convex Splatting, a novel primitive representation that improves scene modeling over Gaussian primitives by better capturing edges and surfaces with fewer primitives.

Findings

Achieves up to 0.81 higher PSNR than 3D Gaussian Splatting

Reduces the number of primitives needed for scene representation

Maintains high rendering speed while improving quality

Abstract

Recent advances in radiance field reconstruction, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have achieved high-quality novel view synthesis and fast rendering by representing scenes with compositions of Gaussian primitives. However, 3D Gaussians present several limitations for scene reconstruction. Accurately capturing hard edges is challenging without significantly increasing the number of Gaussians, creating a large memory footprint. Moreover, they struggle to represent flat surfaces, as they are diffused in space. Without hand-crafted regularizers, they tend to disperse irregularly around the actual surface. To circumvent these issues, we introduce a novel method, named 3D Convex Splatting (3DCS), which leverages 3D smooth convexes as primitives for modeling geometrically-meaningful radiance fields from multi-view images. Smooth convex shapes offer greater flexibility than Gaussians, allowing for a better representation of 3D scenes with hard edges and dense volumes using fewer primitives. Powered by our efficient CUDA-based rasterizer, 3DCS achieves superior performance over 3DGS on benchmarks such as Mip-NeRF360, Tanks and Temples, and Deep Blending. Specifically, our method attains an improvement of up to 0.81 in PSNR and 0.026 in LPIPS compared to 3DGS while maintaining high rendering speeds and reducing the number of required primitives. Our results highlight the potential of 3D Convex Splatting to become the new standard for high-quality scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Project page: convexsplatting.github.io.