3d graphics developers

Abstract: Feed-forward Gaussian splatting models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in reconstructing three-dimensional (3D) objects from a few two-dimensional (2D) images, even if they are unseen. As existing methods typically predict Gaussian primitives uniformly across the 3D space, most primitives are placed in non-object regions. This may hinder the representation of fine object details. This paper proposes a Voxel-Selective Gaussian Splatting model (VS-Splat), a new end-to-endfeed-forward Gaussian splatting framework that predicts many primitives only within selected voxels that are likely to belong to an object, without 3D structural supervision. To achieve this, we propose a new learnable voxel selection approach that identifies object-centric voxels only with 2D rendering supervision. Our sparse-view rendering experiments with three benchmark datasets show that proposed VS-Splat outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. We further demonstrate its effectiveness as a backbone for an existing densification method and show that anoptional extension improves its robustness to inaccurate camera pose estimates.

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) renders novel views in real time, but an uncertainty heatmap does not certify that a rendered view meets a certain prediction coverage. We treat novel-view synthesis as structured regression and ask that, with probability at least $1-α$, RGB prediction boxes cover at least a $1-β$ fraction of pixels in a new view. We propose View-Structured Conformal Prediction (VSCP). It splits the pre-calibration scale into a spatial shape from the renderer and a transferable view-difficulty factor, which predicts the smallest view-wise multiplier that shape needs. A held-out quantile over views (View-CP) then gives finite-sample validity even when transferring to new scenes. The same factorization makes the analysis exact: a conformity score is the ratio of oracle to predicted view difficulty, and excess width separates into a test-side and a calibration-side term. Across 13 real scenes, pixel-pooled calibration reaches 89.9\% marginal pixel coverage but only 61.4\% view-event coverage at a 90\% target, while View-CP reaches 91.7--92.0\%. At matched coverage VSCP cuts width by 22.1\% against a constant scale, and matches a ten-model ensemble's 21.0\% reduction using only one model per scene and four rather than ten rasterization passes per query. VSCP also improves on the closest single-model baseline, the 3DGS-U field, by 4.7 points ($p=0.0225$). The view predictor transfers from bounded source families to all nine unbounded Mip-NeRF~360 scenes. There the full scale beats the constant scale with 20.7\% width saving on all nine scenes. It also keeps an 18.3\% saving under a different densification backbone and runs at 216--280 FPS on an RTX~4090.

Abstract: Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) encode a scene with complementary inductive biases, but existing cross-representation distillation typically fixes one representation as teacher for the entire scene. A globally fixed teacher can propagate local reconstruction errors. We present RouteBridge, a bidirectional framework that selects the teaching direction for each ray. Its reliability estimator combines photometric residuals with representation-specific geometric evidence and routes supervision from NeRF to 3DGS, from 3DGS to NeRF, or abstains. A renderer-independent interface transfers color, opacity, and normalized depth without shared features or point correspondence. On mip-NeRF 360, the NeRF and 3DGS exports reach 28.56 and 28.77 dB, respectively. The 3DGS export improves over 3DGS by 1.56 dB and over NeRF-GS by 0.45 dB while reducing LPIPS to 0.207. On static three-view DTU, RouteBridge obtains 21.12 dB. Ablations show that both adaptive routing and geometric ray targets contribute to the improvement.

Abstract: While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for real-time novel view synthesis, rendering high-fidelity scenes often relies on a massive number of Gaussian primitives, incurring substantial storage and computational overhead. Existing simplification techniques are largely intrusive, requiring training-time pruning, architectural modifications, or computationally expensive per-scene fine-tuning. These drawbacks limit their deployment on off-the-shelf pretrained models. In this paper, we propose CVT-GS, a novel optimization-free post-hoc simplification framework that directly compresses trained 3DGS scenes without sacrificing visual fidelity. Our approach first constructs spatially coherent cells over Gaussian centers via a geometry-aware Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT). Subsequently, a lightweight neural cell merger predicts the geometry and appearance of a single, highly representative Gaussian primitive for each cell under differentiable rendering supervision. By formulating simplification as a rendering-aware many-to-one merging process rather than naive primitive pruning, CVT-GS outputs a standard 3DGS scene that is seamlessly compatible with existing renderers. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. Notably, when achieving a 100-fold reduction in Gaussian points, our method operates 12 times faster than state-of-the-art methods while improving the PSNR by 1.3 dB.

Abstract: Gaussian Splatting has been effective in inferring scene representations that excel in novel view synthesis. Multiple splats cooperate seamlessly to synthesize the pixels of novel views and are jointly optimized even though they only affect each other indirectly, via pixels they project to in common. We present an approach that enables direct communication among splats to enhance the geometric structures they form in 3D. This is accomplished by Tensor Voting, which was originally designed to infer structures from noisy inputs and has been adapted here to provide supervision during test-time optimization, leading to more accurate scene geometry. We introduce a new class of 3D losses that do not rely on rendering and can be combined with essentially all losses previously reported in the literature. Our 3D losses are especially effective when the input views are sparse and geometric regularization is essential due to limited supervision from the images. Our method is easy to integrate with a diverse set of backbones, and our experiments on the DTU and Tanks-and-Temples datasets demonstrate that TV-SGS improves the geometry of the outputs compared to the backbone, while maintaining or improving rendering quality.

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting has recently revolutionised novel view synthesis as well as many other 3D vision methods and applications. Drawing inspiration from this representation, we now rethink textures to overcome the main issues of UV mapping while considerably lowering their memory footprint. Heat Kernel Textures (HKTex) eliminate UV unwrapping as well as their persistent issues of wasted UV space, seams, distortions, vertex-duplication, and varying resolution. Grounded in discrete Riemannian geometry and intrinsically defined on any manifold surface discretised as a triangular mesh, HKTex uses anisotropic heat kernels as geodesic equivalents to Gaussians. Like our kernels, also the optimisation of their position and the adaptive densification strategies were redefined to operate on the surface of the object to be textureised. Our novel representation is also fully integrated with a physically based renderer and can be optimised either from existing textures or multi-view images. Our project page and code are available at circle-group.github.io/research/HeatKernelTextures.