# Pixel-GS: Density Control with Pixel-aware Gradient for 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15530 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15530/

## Key facts

- Cited by 113 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [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)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10642/) (2023)
- [Baking Neural Radiance Fields for Real-Time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14645/) (2021)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)
- [SC-GS: Sparse-Controlled Gaussian Splatting for Editable Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14937/) (2023)
- [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)
- [FreeNeRF: Improving Few-shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07418/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02436/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 113)

- [TrajectoryCrafter: Redirecting Camera Trajectory for Monocular Videos via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05638/) (2025)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17418/) (2024)
- [3DGS.zip: A survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09510/) (2024)
- [R2-Gaussian: Rectifying Radiative Gaussian Splatting for Tomographic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20693/) (2024)
- [FastGS: Training 3D Gaussian Splatting in 100 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04283/) (2025)
- [3DRealCar: An In-the-wild RGB-D Car Dataset with 360-degree Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04875/) (2024)
- [Instant Gaussian Stream: Fast and Generalizable Streaming of Dynamic Scene Reconstruction via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16979/) (2025)
- [Rethinking End-to-End 2D to 3D Scene Segmentation in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14029/) (2025)
- [DropoutGS: Dropping Out Gaussians for Better Sparse-view Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09491/) (2025)
- [UAVScenes: A Multi-Modal Dataset for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22412/) (2025)
- [SRGS: Super-Resolution 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10318/) (2024)
- [UW-GS: Distractor-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for Enhanced Underwater Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01517/) (2024)
- [Beyond Gaussians: Fast and High-Fidelity 3D Splatting with Linear Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12440/) (2024)
- [Gaussian in the Dark: Real-Time View Synthesis From Inconsistent Dark Images Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09130/) (2024)
- [MVGS: Multi-view Regulated Gaussian Splatting for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02103/) (2024)
- [StreetSurfGS: Scalable Urban Street Surface Reconstruction with Planar-based Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04354/) (2024)
- [Generative Densification: Learning to Densify Gaussians for High-Fidelity Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06234/) (2024)
- [Efficient Scene Modeling via Structure-Aware and Region-Prioritized 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12788/) (2024)
- [DROID-Splat: Combining end-to-end SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17660/) (2024)
- [Neural Shell Texture Splatting: More Details and Fewer Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20200/) (2025)
- [Efficient Density Control for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10133/) (2024)
- [SfM-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting via Hierarchical Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01553/) (2024)
- [Perceptual-GS: Scene-adaptive Perceptual Densification for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12400/) (2025)
- [DisC-GS: Discontinuity-aware Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15196/) (2024)
- [Free360: Layered Gaussian Splatting for Unbounded 360-Degree View Synthesis from Extremely Sparse and Unposed Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24382/) (2025)
- [RobustSplat: Decoupling Densification and Dynamics for Transient-Free 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02751/) (2025)
- [CF3: Compact and Fast 3D Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05254/) (2025)
- [D2GS: Depth-and-Density Guided Gaussian Splatting for Stable and Accurate Sparse-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08566/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Splatting Feature Fields for Privacy-Preserving Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23569/) (2025)
- [Mipmap-GS: Let Gaussians Deform with Scale-specific Mipmap for Anti-aliasing Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06286/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive novel view synthesis results while advancing real-time rendering performance. However, it relies heavily on the quality of the initial point cloud, resulting in blurring and needle-like artifacts in areas with insufficient initializing points. This is mainly attributed to the point cloud growth condition in 3DGS that only considers the average gradient magnitude of points from observable views, thereby failing to grow for large Gaussians that are observable for many viewpoints while many of them are only covered in the boundaries. To this end, we propose a novel method, named Pixel-GS, to take into account the number of pixels covered by the Gaussian in each view during the computation of the growth condition. We regard the covered pixel numbers as the weights to dynamically average the gradients from different views, such that the growth of large Gaussians can be prompted. As a result, points within the areas with insufficient initializing points can be grown more effectively, leading to a more accurate and detailed reconstruction. In addition, we propose a simple yet effective strategy to scale the gradient field according to the distance to the camera, to suppress the growth of floaters near the camera. Extensive experiments both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality while maintaining real-time rendering speed, on the challenging Mip-NeRF 360 and Tanks & Temples datasets.