# InstantSplat: Sparse-view Gaussian Splatting in Seconds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.20309 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20309/

## Key facts

- Cited by 70 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2024.

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

- [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)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [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)
- [BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06405/) (2021)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [DL3DV-10K: A Large-Scale Scene Dataset for Deep Learning-based 3D Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16256/) (2023)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [Putting NeRF on a Diet: Semantically Consistent Few-Shot View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00677/) (2021)
- [Cascade Cost Volume for High-Resolution Multi-View Stereo and Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06378/) (2019)
- [INeRF: Inverting Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05877/) (2020)
- [ReconFusion: 3D Reconstruction with Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02981/) (2023)
- [FreeNeRF: Improving Few-shot Neural Rendering with Free Frequency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07418/) (2023)
- [FSGS: Real-Time Few-shot View Synthesis using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00451/) (2023)
- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [NoPe-NeRF: Optimising Neural Radiance Field with No Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07388/) (2022)
- [MVImgNet: A Large-scale Dataset of Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06042/) (2023)
- [Self-Calibrating Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13826/) (2021)
- [SPARF: Neural Radiance Fields from Sparse and Noisy Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11738/) (2022)
- [COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07504/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [ReconX: Reconstruct Any Scene from Sparse Views with Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16767/) (2024)
- [PreF3R: Pose-Free Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Variable-length Image Sequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16877/) (2024)
- [NerfBaselines: Consistent and Reproducible Evaluation of Novel View Synthesis Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17345/) (2024)
- [DAS3R: Dynamics-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Static Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19584/) (2024)
- [GaussianSR: 3D Gaussian Super-Resolution with 2D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10111/) (2024)
- [LoRA3D: Low-Rank Self-Calibration of 3D Geometric Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07746/) (2024)
- [Real-is-Sim: Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap with a Dynamic Digital Twin](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03597/) (2025)
- [Off The Grid: Detection of Primitives for Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15508/) (2025)
- [G4Splat: Geometry-Guided Gaussian Splatting with Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12099/) (2025)
- [OmniCam: Unified Multimodal Video Generation via Camera Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02312/) (2025)
- [Dust to Tower: Coarse-to-Fine Photo-Realistic Scene Reconstruction from Sparse Uncalibrated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19518/) (2024)
- [Unposed 3DGS Reconstruction with Probabilistic Procrustes Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18541/) (2025)
- [AD-GS: Alternating Densification for Sparse-Input 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11003/) (2025)
- [Forge4D: Feed-Forward 4D Human Reconstruction and Interpolation from Uncalibrated Sparse-view Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24209/) (2025)
- [Trends in Motion Prediction Toward Deployable and Generalizable Autonomy: A Revisit and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09074/) (2025)
- [IDESplat: Iterative Depth Probability Estimation for Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03824/) (2026)
- [ZipSplat: Fewer Gaussians, Better Splats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05102/) (2026)
- [Self-Calibrating 4D Novel View Synthesis from Monocular Videos Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01042/) (2024)
- [GaMO: Geometry-aware Multi-view Diffusion Outpainting for Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.25073/) (2025)
- [GBR: Generative Bundle Refinement for High-fidelity Gaussian Splatting with Enhanced Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05908/) (2024)
- [SparseGS-W: Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting in the Wild with Generative Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19452/) (2025)
- [GeoNVS: Geometry Grounded Video Diffusion for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14965/) (2026)
- [Towards Real-Time Gaussian Splatting: Accelerating 3DGS through Photometric SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03825/) (2024)
- [Learning Radiance Fields from a Single Snapshot Compressive Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19483/) (2024)
- [Observer-Actor: Active Vision Imitation Learning with Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18140/) (2025)
- [ObjSplat: Geometry-Aware Gaussian Surfels for Active Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06997/) (2026)
- [DAV-GSWT: Diffusion-Active-View Sampling for Data-Efficient Gaussian Splatting Wang Tiles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15355/) (2026)
- [BlitzGS: City-Scale Gaussian Splatting at Lightning Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13794/) (2026)
- [DynSUP: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting from An Unposed Image Pair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00851/) (2024)
- [LighthouseGS: Indoor Structure-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for Panorama-Style Mobile Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06109/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While neural 3D reconstruction has advanced substantially, its performance significantly degrades with sparse-view data, which limits its broader applicability, since SfM is often unreliable in sparse-view scenarios where feature matches are scarce. In this paper, we introduce InstantSplat, a novel approach for addressing sparse-view 3D scene reconstruction at lightning-fast speed. InstantSplat employs a self-supervised framework that optimizes 3D scene representation and camera poses by unprojecting 2D pixels into 3D space and aligning them using differentiable neural rendering. The optimization process is initialized with a large-scale trained geometric foundation model, which provides dense priors that yield initial points through model inference, after which we further optimize all scene parameters using photometric errors. To mitigate redundancy introduced by the prior model, we propose a co-visibility-based geometry initialization, and a Gaussian-based bundle adjustment is employed to rapidly adapt both the scene representation and camera parameters without relying on a complex adaptive density control process. Overall, InstantSplat is compatible with multiple point-based representations for view synthesis and surface reconstruction. It achieves an acceleration of over 30x in reconstruction and improves visual quality (SSIM) from 0.3755 to 0.7624 compared to traditional SfM with 3D-GS.