2026/03/21 by Ivan Desiatov, Torsten Sattler
#cs.CV
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the method of choice for photo-realistic novel view synthesis (NVS), due to its efficiency and compelling visual quality. 3DGS represents the scene through a set of 3D Gaussians, parameterized by their position, spatial extent, and view-dependent color. Starting from an initial point cloud, 3DGS refines the Gaussians' parameters as to reconstruct a set of training images as accurately as possible. Typically, a sparse Structure-from-Motion point cloud is used as initialization. In order to obtain a full scene representation, 3DGS methods thus rely on a densification stage. In this paper, we systematically study how initialization affects 3DGS NVS performance and geometric quality, using several densification strategies. We show that dense initialization does not lead to consistent visual improvements when paired with strong densification. Despite that, it can help in generalization to off-trajectory views and significantly improves geometric consistency of the scene representation.