A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting, focusing on its applications in segmentation, editing, and generation, highlighting methods, datasets, and trends in the field.

Contribution

It categorizes 3DGS applications into core tasks, summarizes methods and datasets, and provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress and emerging trends.

Findings

3DGS enables real-time, high-fidelity rendering for view synthesis.

Applications include segmentation, editing, and generation with shared design principles.

A GitHub repository of resources supports ongoing research.

Abstract

In the context of novel view synthesis, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an efficient and competitive counterpart to Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), enabling high-fidelity photorealistic rendering in real time. Beyond novel view synthesis, the explicit and compact nature of 3DGS enables a wide range of downstream applications that require geometric and semantic understanding. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in 3DGS applications. It first reviews the reconstruction preliminaries of 3DGS, followed by the problem formulation, 2D foundation models, and related NeRF-based research areas that inform downstream 3DGS applications. We then categorize 3DGS applications into three foundational tasks: segmentation, editing, and generation, alongside additional functional applications built upon or tightly coupled with these foundational capabilities. For each, we summarize representative methods, supervision strategies, and learning paradigms, highlighting shared design principles and emerging trends. Commonly used datasets and evaluation protocols are also summarized, along with comparative analyses of recent methods across public benchmarks. To support ongoing research and development, a continually updated repository of papers, code, and resources is maintained at https://github.com/heshuting555/Awesome-3DGS-Applications.