# Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13681 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/

## Key facts

- Cited by 372 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (2023)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [Dynamic View Synthesis from Dynamic Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06468/) (2021)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)
- [Fast Dynamic Radiance Fields with Time-Aware Neural Voxels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15285/) (2022)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [Neural Point-Based Graphics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08240/) (2019)
- [Dense Depth Priors for Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse Input Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03288/) (2021)
- [Differentiable Surface Splatting for Point-based Geometry Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04173/) (2019)
- [Point-Based Neural Rendering with Per-View Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02369/) (2021)
- [SinNeRF: Training Neural Radiance Fields on Complex Scenes from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00928/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 372)

- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [Mini-Splatting: Representing Scenes with a Constrained Number of Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14166/) (2024)
- [HAC: Hash-grid Assisted Context for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14530/) (2024)
- [Taming 3DGS: High-Quality Radiance Fields with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15643/) (2024)
- [GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14650/) (2024)
- [CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01133/) (2024)
- [Reducing the Memory Footprint of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17074/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11134/) (2024)
- [CompGS: Smaller and Faster Gaussian Splatting with Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18159/) (2023)
- [Revising Densification in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06109/) (2024)
- [RadSplat: Radiance Field-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Robust Real-Time Rendering with 900+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13806/) (2024)
- [Pixel-GS: Density Control with Pixel-aware Gradient for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15530/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian as a New Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07181/) (2024)
- [ContextGS: Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting with Anchor Level Context Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20721/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Gaussian Marbles for Novel View Synthesis of Casual Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18717/) (2024)
- [PUP 3D-GS: Principled Uncertainty Pruning for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10219/) (2024)
- [Speedy-Splat: Fast 3D Gaussian Splatting with Sparse Pixels and Sparse Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00578/) (2024)
- [FlashGS: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale and High-resolution Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07967/) (2024)
- [3DGUT: Enabling Distorted Cameras and Secondary Rays in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12507/) (2024)
- [DreamScene360: Unconstrained Text-to-3D Scene Generation with Panoramic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06903/) (2024)
- [CompGS: Efficient 3D Scene Representation via Compressed Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09458/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17418/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Rate-Distortion Optimized 3D Gaussian Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01597/) (2024)
- [DreamScene: 3D Gaussian-based Text-to-3D Scene Generation via Formation Pattern Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03575/) (2024)
- [3DGS.zip: A survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09510/) (2024)
- [DropGaussian: Structural Regularization for Sparse-view Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00773/) (2025)
- [SMERF: Streamable Memory Efficient Radiance Fields for Real-Time Large-Scene Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07541/) (2023)
- [HAC++: Towards 100X Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12255/) (2025)
- [MesonGS: Post-training Compression of 3D Gaussians via Efficient Attribute Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09756/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 25× 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/.