Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field
Authors: Joo Chan Lee, Daniel Rho, Xiangyu Sun, Jong Hwan Ko, Eunbyung Park

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in capturing complex 3D scenes with high fidelity. However one persistent challenge that hinders the widespread adoption of NeRFs is the computational bottleneck due to the volumetric rendering. On the other hand 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussisan-based representation and adopts the rasterization pipeline to render the images rather than volumetric rendering achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. However a significant drawback arises as 3DGS entails a substantial number of 3D Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric attributes of Gaussian by vector quantization. With model compression techniques such as quantization and entropy coding we consistently show over 25x reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed while maintaining the quality of the scene representation compared to 3DGS. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation achieving high performance fast training compactness and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.