2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields
Authors: name: Binbin Huang, name: Zehao Yu, name: Anpei Chen, name: Andreas Geiger, name: Shenghua Gao

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently revolutionized radiance field
reconstruction, achieving high quality novel view synthesis and fast rendering
speed without baking. However, 3DGS fails to accurately represent surfaces due
to the multi-view inconsistent nature of 3D Gaussians. We present 2D Gaussian
Splatting (2DGS), a novel approach to model and reconstruct geometrically
accurate radiance fields from multi-view images. Our key idea is to collapse
the 3D volume into a set of 2D oriented planar Gaussian disks. Unlike 3D
Gaussians, 2D Gaussians provide view-consistent geometry while modeling
surfaces intrinsically. To accurately recover thin surfaces and achieve stable
optimization, we introduce a perspective-accurate 2D splatting process
utilizing ray-splat intersection and rasterization. Additionally, we
incorporate depth distortion and normal consistency terms to further enhance
the quality of the reconstructions. We demonstrate that our differentiable
renderer allows for noise-free and detailed geometry reconstruction while
maintaining competitive appearance quality, fast training speed, and real-time
rendering. Our code will be made publicly available.