# Revising Densification in Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06109/

## Key facts

- Cited by 128 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [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)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (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)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10642/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Grouping: Segment and Edit Anything in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00732/) (2023)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [PhysGaussian: Physics-Integrated 3D Gaussians for Generative Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12198/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [Text-to-3D using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16585/) (2023)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14650/) (2024)
- [HUGS: Human Gaussian Splats](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17910/) (2023)
- [Gaussian-SLAM: Photo-realistic Dense SLAM with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10070/) (2023)
- [Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03704/) (2023)
- [GART: Gaussian Articulated Template Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16099/) (2023)
- [Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08581/) (2023)
- [Spec-Gaussian: Anisotropic View-Dependent Appearance for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15870/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 128)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09591/) (2024)
- [Taming 3DGS: High-Quality Radiance Fields with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15643/) (2024)
- [Speedy-Splat: Fast 3D Gaussian Splatting with Sparse Pixels and Sparse Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00578/) (2024)
- [3DGS.zip: A survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09510/) (2024)
- [CityGaussianV2: Efficient and Geometrically Accurate Reconstruction for Large-Scale Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00771/) (2024)
- [EVER: Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering for Real-time View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01804/) (2024)
- [3DGS-LM: Faster Gaussian-Splatting Optimization with Levenberg-Marquardt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12892/) (2024)
- [FastGS: Training 3D Gaussian Splatting in 100 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04283/) (2025)
- [Textured Gaussians for Enhanced 3D Scene Appearance Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18625/) (2024)
- [Deformable Beta Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18630/) (2025)
- [DashGaussian: Optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting in 200 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18402/) (2025)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussian Fields for Urban Areas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03175/) (2024)
- [Effective Rank Analysis and Regularization for Enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11672/) (2024)
- [Sort-free Gaussian Splatting via Weighted Sum Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18931/) (2024)
- [BillBoard Splatting (BBSplat): Learnable Textured Primitives for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08508/) (2024)
- [GaussianSR: 3D Gaussian Super-Resolution with 2D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10111/) (2024)
- [MVGS: Multi-view Regulated Gaussian Splatting for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02103/) (2024)
- [3D-GSW: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Robust Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13222/) (2024)
- [Poison-splat: Computation Cost Attack on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08190/) (2024)
- [Generative Densification: Learning to Densify Gaussians for High-Fidelity Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06234/) (2024)
- [Faster-GS: Analyzing and Improving Gaussian Splatting Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09999/) (2026)
- [Efficient Scene Modeling via Structure-Aware and Region-Prioritized 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12788/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Satellite Image Photogrammetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13047/) (2024)
- [AV-GS: Learning Material and Geometry Aware Priors for Novel View Acoustic Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08920/) (2024)
- [3D Student Splatting and Scooping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10148/) (2025)
- [Efficient Density Control for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10133/) (2024)
- [Steepest Descent Density Control for Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05587/) (2025)
- [Hybrid 3D-4D Gaussian Splatting for Fast Dynamic Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13215/) (2025)
- [SfM-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting via Hierarchical Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01553/) (2024)
- [Volumetrically Consistent 3D Gaussian Rasterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03378/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we address the limitations of Adaptive Density Control (ADC) in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a scene representation method achieving high-quality, photorealistic results for novel view synthesis. ADC has been introduced for automatic 3D point primitive management, controlling densification and pruning, however, with certain limitations in the densification logic. Our main contribution is a more principled, pixel-error driven formulation for density control in 3DGS, leveraging an auxiliary, per-pixel error function as the criterion for densification. We further introduce a mechanism to control the total number of primitives generated per scene and correct a bias in the current opacity handling strategy of ADC during cloning operations. Our approach leads to consistent quality improvements across a variety of benchmark scenes, without sacrificing the method's efficiency.