QuickSplat: Fast 3D Surface Reconstruction via Learned Gaussian Initialization

TL;DR

QuickSplat introduces a learned Gaussian initialization method that significantly accelerates 3D surface reconstruction and improves accuracy in large-scale indoor scenes by leveraging data-driven priors and joint scene parameter estimation.

Contribution

It presents a novel data-driven initialization and densification approach for Gaussian splatting that speeds up optimization and enhances reconstruction quality.

Findings

8x faster runtime compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Up to 48% reduction in depth errors.

Effective reconstruction of large-scale indoor scenes.

Abstract

Surface reconstruction is fundamental to computer vision and graphics, enabling applications in 3D modeling, mixed reality, robotics, and more. Existing approaches based on volumetric rendering obtain promising results, but optimize on a per-scene basis, resulting in a slow optimization that can struggle to model under-observed or textureless regions. We introduce QuickSplat, which learns data-driven priors to generate dense initializations for 2D gaussian splatting optimization of large-scale indoor scenes. This provides a strong starting point for the reconstruction, which accelerates the convergence of the optimization and improves the geometry of flat wall structures. We further learn to jointly estimate the densification and update of the scene parameters during each iteration; our proposed densifier network predicts new Gaussians based on the rendering gradients of existing ones, removing the needs of heuristics for densification. Extensive experiments on large-scale indoor scene reconstruction demonstrate the superiority of our data-driven optimization. Concretely, we accelerate runtime by 8x, while decreasing depth errors by up to 48% in comparison to state of the art methods.