StreamSTGS: Streaming Spatial and Temporal Gaussian Grids for Real-Time Free-Viewpoint Video
This work addresses the challenge of efficient streaming for free-viewpoint video, enabling real-time applications with adaptive bitrate control, though it is incremental as it builds on 3D Gaussian Splatting methods.
The paper tackles the problem of high storage requirements in real-time free-viewpoint video streaming by proposing StreamSTGS, a novel representation that reduces average frame size to 170KB while increasing PSNR by an average of 1dB compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Streaming free-viewpoint video~(FVV) in real-time still faces significant challenges, particularly in training, rendering, and transmission efficiency. Harnessing superior performance of 3D Gaussian Splatting~(3DGS), recent 3DGS-based FVV methods have achieved notable breakthroughs in both training and rendering. However, the storage requirements of these methods can reach up to $10$MB per frame, making stream FVV in real-time impossible. To address this problem, we propose a novel FVV representation, dubbed StreamSTGS, designed for real-time streaming. StreamSTGS represents a dynamic scene using canonical 3D Gaussians, temporal features, and a deformation field. For high compression efficiency, we encode canonical Gaussian attributes as 2D images and temporal features as a video. This design not only enables real-time streaming, but also inherently supports adaptive bitrate control based on network condition without any extra training. Moreover, we propose a sliding window scheme to aggregate adjacent temporal features to learn local motions, and then introduce a transformer-guided auxiliary training module to learn global motions. On diverse FVV benchmarks, StreamSTGS demonstrates competitive performance on all metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. Notably, StreamSTGS increases the PSNR by an average of $1$dB while reducing the average frame size to just $170$KB. The code is publicly available on https://github.com/kkkzh/StreamSTGS.