Isotropic Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering

The 3D Gaussian splatting method has drawn a lot of attention, thanks to its high performance in training and high quality of the rendered image. However, it uses anisotropic Gaussian kernels to represent the scene. Although such anisotropic kernels have advantages in representing the geometry, they lead to difficulties in terms of computation, such as splitting or merging two kernels. In this paper, we propose to use isotropic Gaussian kernels to avoid such difficulties in the computation, leading to a higher performance method. The experiments confirm that the proposed method is about 100X faster without losing the geometry representation accuracy. The proposed method can be applied in a large range applications where the radiance field is needed, such as 3D reconstruction, view synthesis, and dynamic object modeling.