GaussianPile: A Unified Sparse Gaussian Splatting Framework for Slice-based Volumetric Reconstruction
This provides a practical solution for compressing and visualizing volumetric datasets in domains like microscopy and ultrasound, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Gaussian splatting techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of compressing slice-based volumetric imaging data while preserving internal structure, introducing GaussianPile to unify 3D Gaussian splatting with an imaging-aware model, resulting in up to 11x faster reconstruction than NeRF-based methods and 16x compression over voxel grids.
Slice-based volumetric imaging is widely applied and it demands representations that compress aggressively while preserving internal structure for analysis. We introduce GaussianPile, unifying 3D Gaussian splatting with an imaging system-aware focus model to address this challenge. Our proposed method introduces three key innovations: (i) a slice-aware piling strategy that positions anisotropic 3D Gaussians to model through-slice contributions, (ii) a differentiable projection operator that encodes the finite-thickness point spread function of the imaging acquisition system, and (iii) a compact encoding and joint optimization pipeline that simultaneously reconstructs and compresses the Gaussian sets. Our CUDA-based design retains the compression and real-time rendering efficiency of Gaussian primitives while preserving high-frequency internal volumetric detail. Experiments on microscopy and ultrasound datasets demonstrate that our method reduces storage and reconstruction cost, sustains diagnostic fidelity, and enables fast 2D visualization, along with 3D voxelization. In practice, it delivers high-quality results in as few as 3 minutes, up to 11x faster than NeRF-based approaches, and achieves consistent 16x compression over voxel grids, offering a practical path to deployable compression and exploration of slice-based volumetric datasets.