3D Student Splatting and Scooping
This work addresses a foundational component in neural rendering, offering significant improvements for applications relying on 3DGS, though it is incremental in nature.
The authors tackled the problem of improving 3D Gaussian Splatting for novel view synthesis by proposing a new mixture model using Student's t distributions with positive and negative densities, which outperformed existing methods in quality and parameter efficiency, reducing component numbers by up to 82% while maintaining comparable results.
Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides a new framework for novel view synthesis, and has spiked a new wave of research in neural rendering and related applications. As 3DGS is becoming a foundational component of many models, any improvement on 3DGS itself can bring huge benefits. To this end, we aim to improve the fundamental paradigm and formulation of 3DGS. We argue that as an unnormalized mixture model, it needs to be neither Gaussians nor splatting. We subsequently propose a new mixture model consisting of flexible Student's t distributions, with both positive (splatting) and negative (scooping) densities. We name our model Student Splatting and Scooping, or SSS. When providing better expressivity, SSS also poses new challenges in learning. Therefore, we also propose a new principled sampling approach for optimization. Through exhaustive evaluation and comparison, across multiple datasets, settings, and metrics, we demonstrate that SSS outperforms existing methods in terms of quality and parameter efficiency, e.g. achieving matching or better quality with similar numbers of components, and obtaining comparable results while reducing the component number by as much as 82%.