2024/02/21 by Joongho Jo, H. Kim, Jo, Joongho +3 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hardware Architecture (cs.AR) #Image Processing and 3D Reconstruction #Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.13827
openalex publication_date 2024/02/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) is a new rendering approach that outperforms the neural radiance field (NeRF) in terms of both speed and image quality. 3D-GS represents 3D scenes by utilizing millions of 3D Gaussians and projects these Gaussians onto the 2D image plane for rendering. However, during the rendering process, a substantial number of unnecessary 3D Gaussians exist for the current view direction, resulting in significant computation costs associated with their identification. In this paper, we propose a computational reduction technique that quickly identifies unnecessary 3D Gaussians in real-time for rendering the current view without compromising image quality. This is accomplished through the offline clustering of 3D Gaussians that are close in distance, followed by the projection of these clusters onto a 2D image plane during runtime. Additionally, we analyze the bottleneck associated with the proposed technique when executed on GPUs and propose an efficient hardware architecture that seamlessly supports the proposed scheme. For the Mip-NeRF360 dataset, the proposed technique excludes 63% of 3D Gaussians on average before the 2D image projection, which reduces the overall rendering computation by almost 38.3% without sacrificing peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR). The proposed accelerator also achieves a speedup of 10.7x compared to a GPU.