LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS
Project page: lightgaussian.github.io/
Code: github.com/VITA-Group/LightGaussian
Recent advancements in real-time neural rendering using point-based techniques have paved the way for the widespread adoption of 3D representations. However, foundational approaches like 3D Gaussian Splatting come with a substantial storage overhead caused by growing the SfM points to millions, often demanding gigabyte-level disk space for a single unbounded scene, posing significant scalability challenges and hindering the splatting efficiency.
To address this challenge, we introduce LightGaussian, a novel method designed to transform 3D Gaussians into a more efficient and compact format. Drawing inspiration from the concept of Network Pruning, LightGaussian identifies Gaussians that are insignificant in contributing to the scene reconstruction and adopts a pruning and recovery process, effectively reducing redundancy in Gaussian counts while preserving visual effects. Additionally, LightGaussian employs distillation and pseudo-view augmentation to distill spherical harmonics to a lower degree, allowing knowledge transfer to more compact representations while maintaining scene appearance. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid scheme, VecTree Quantization, to quantize all attributes, resulting in lower bitwidth representations with minimal accuracy losses.
In summary, LightGaussian achieves an averaged compression rate over 15× while boosting the FPS from 139 to 215, enabling an efficient representation of complex scenes on Mip-NeRF 360, Tank & Temple datasets.
LightGaussian efficiently compresses 3D scene data, enhancing performance and reducing storage needs while preserving visual quality.
lightgaussian.github.io
[NeurIPS 2024 Spotlight]"LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS", Zhiwen Fan, Kevin Wang, Kairun Wen, Zehao Zhu, Dejia Xu, Zhangyang Wang - VITA-...
github.com
AI explanation:
Sure, let's break it down:
New techniques using points (like dots) to create 3D images in real time are becoming more popular. But, one of the main methods, called 3D Gaussian Splatting, needs a lot of storage space because it uses millions of these points. This can take up gigabytes of space for just one scene, which makes it hard to scale and slows down the process.
To solve this, a new method called LightGaussian has been introduced. It's inspired by Network Pruning, which is a way to remove parts of a network that aren't really needed. LightGaussian does something similar by identifying and removing points that don't contribute much to the final image, reducing the number of points needed without affecting the visual quality.
LightGaussian also uses techniques called distillation and pseudo-view augmentation to simplify the points even further, while still keeping the scene looking the same. Plus, it introduces a new way to represent all the attributes of the points, called VecTree Quantization, which results in smaller representations with minimal loss in accuracy.
In short, LightGaussian can compress the data by more than 15 times and increase the frames per second from 139 to 215. This makes it possible to efficiently represent complex scenes on certain datasets.