DNGaussian: Optimizing Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Radiance Fields with Global-Local Depth Normalization
Authors: Jiahe Li, Jiawei Zhang, Xiao Bai, Jin Zheng, Xin Ning, Jun Zhou, Lin Gu

Radiance fields have demonstrated impressive performance in synthesizing novel views from sparse input views yet prevailing methods suffer from high training costs and slow inference speed. This paper introduces DNGaussian a depth-regularized framework based on 3D Gaussian radiance fields offering real-time and high-quality few-shot novel view synthesis at low costs. Our motivation stems from the highly efficient representation and surprising quality of the recent 3D Gaussian Splatting despite it will encounter a geometry degradation when input views decrease. In the Gaussian radiance fields we find this degradation in scene geometry primarily lined to the positioning of Gaussian primitives and can be mitigated by depth constraint. Consequently we propose a Hard and Soft Depth Regularization to restore accurate scene geometry under coarse monocular depth supervision while maintaining a fine-grained color appearance. To further refine detailed geometry reshaping we introduce Global-Local Depth Normalization enhancing the focus on small local depth changes. Extensive experiments on LLFF DTU and Blender datasets demonstrate that DNGaussian outperforms state-of-the-art methods achieving comparable or better results with significantly reduced memory cost a 25x reduction in training time and over 3000x faster rendering speed. Code is available at: https://github.com/Fictionarry/DNGaussian