AdpSplit: Error-Driven Adaptive Splitting for Faster Geometry Discovery in 3D Gaussian Splatting

TL;DR

AdpSplit is an error-driven adaptive splitting method that accelerates 3D Gaussian Splatting training by reducing densification iterations while maintaining rendering quality.

Contribution

It introduces an error-driven adaptive split operator that reduces training time in 3D Gaussian Splatting without sacrificing quality.

Findings

Reduces training time by up to 22.3% across multiple datasets.

Matches full-schedule PSNR on MipNeRF360 with 16.4% less training time.

Achieves 12.6x acceleration over vanilla 3DGS.

Abstract

Adaptive density control in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) repeatedly grows the Gaussian population through fixed-cardinality random splitting to discover useful scene structure. However, in vanilla 3DGS, its binary split operator requires many densification rounds to expose fine details, making it a bottleneck for efficient training schedules with fewer iterations. We introduce AdpSplit, an error-driven adaptive split operator that determines the number of split children and initializes the child parameters from L1-pixel-error region statistics, enabling fewer densification iterations, thus reduced training time, while preserving the rendering quality of full-schedule training. Across the MipNeRF360, Deep-Blending, and Tanks&Temples datasets, AdpSplit reduces the training time of multiple accelerated 3DGS pipelines by 9.2%-22.3% as a simple drop-in replacement for the standard split operator. With FastGS, AdpSplit matches the full-schedule PSNR on MipNeRF360 while reducing training time by 16.4%, corresponding to a 12.6x acceleration over vanilla 3DGS.