# MoDGS: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting from Casually-captured Monocular Videos with Depth Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00434/

## Key facts

- Cited by 51 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [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)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [SyncDreamer: Generating Multiview-consistent Images from a Single-view Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03453/) (2023)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10642/) (2023)
- [Non-Rigid Neural Radiance Fields: Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis of a Dynamic Scene From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12247/) (2020)
- [Dynamic View Synthesis from Dynamic Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06468/) (2021)
- [Space-time Neural Irradiance Fields for Free-Viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12950/) (2020)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [SC-GS: Sparse-Controlled Gaussian Splatting for Editable Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14937/) (2023)
- [Fast Dynamic Radiance Fields with Time-Aware Neural Voxels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15285/) (2022)
- [Spacetime Gaussian Feature Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16812/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [Align3R: Aligned Monocular Depth Estimation for Dynamic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03079/) (2024)
- [FreeTimeGS: Free Gaussian Primitives at Anytime and Anywhere for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05348/) (2025)
- [MoVieS: Motion-Aware 4D Dynamic View Synthesis in One Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10065/) (2025)
- [Advancing Extended Reality with 3D Gaussian Splatting: Innovations and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06257/) (2024)
- [VideoArtGS: Building Digital Twins of Articulated Objects from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17647/) (2025)
- [Dynamics-Aware Gaussian Splatting Streaming Towards Fast On-the-Fly 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14847/) (2024)
- [Vivid4D: Improving 4D Reconstruction from Monocular Video by Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11092/) (2025)
- [AdaGaR: Adaptive Gabor Representation for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00796/) (2026)
- [Uncertainty Matters in Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Monocular 4D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12768/) (2025)
- [UFO-4D: Unposed Feedforward 4D Reconstruction from Two Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24290/) (2026)
- [ViDAR: Video Diffusion-Aware 4D Reconstruction From Monocular Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18792/) (2025)
- [Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19255/) (2025)
- [RelayGS: Reconstructing Dynamic Scenes with Large-Scale and Complex Motions via Relay Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02493/) (2024)
- [Geometry-Consistent 4D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-Input Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23044/) (2025)
- [TED-4DGS: Temporally Activated and Embedding-based Deformation for 4DGS Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05446/) (2025)
- [BulletGen: Improving 4D Reconstruction with Bullet-Time Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18601/) (2025)
- [Mono4DGS-HDR: High Dynamic Range 4D Gaussian Splatting from Alternating-exposure Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18489/) (2025)
- [Splannequin: Freezing Monocular Mannequin-Challenge Footage with Dual-Detection Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05113/) (2025)
- [MoCam: Unified Novel View Synthesis via Structured Denoising Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12119/) (2026)
- [Lift4D: Harmonizing Single-View 3D Estimation for 4D Reconstruction In-the-Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23688/) (2026)
- [From Tokens to Nodes: Semantic-Guided Motion Control for Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02732/) (2025)
- [SV-GS: Sparse View 4D Reconstruction with Skeleton-Driven Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00285/) (2026)
- [SharpTimeGS: Sharp and Stable Dynamic Gaussian Splatting via Lifespan Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02989/) (2026)
- [Gaussian Sequences with Multi-Scale Dynamics for 4D Reconstruction from Monocular Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13806/) (2026)
- [PanopticQuery: Unified Query-Time Reasoning for 4D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05638/) (2026)
- [In Depth We Trust: Reliable Monocular Depth Supervision for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05715/) (2026)
- [On the Design of Mixture-of-Experts for Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08250/) (2026)
- [ReViV: Reconstructing the Viewer and the View in 4D from Monocular Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17790/) (2026)
- [Reconstructing the Dynamic World: A Representation-Centric View of 4D Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39960/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose MoDGS, a new pipeline to render novel views of dy namic scenes from a casually captured monocular video. Previous monocular dynamic NeRF or Gaussian Splatting methods strongly rely on the rapid move ment of input cameras to construct multiview consistency but struggle to recon struct dynamic scenes on casually captured input videos whose cameras are either static or move slowly. To address this challenging task, MoDGS adopts recent single-view depth estimation methods to guide the learning of the dynamic scene. Then, a novel 3D-aware initialization method is proposed to learn a reasonable deformation field and a new robust depth loss is proposed to guide the learning of dynamic scene geometry. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MoDGS is able to render high-quality novel view images of dynamic scenes from just a casually captured monocular video, which outperforms state-of-the-art meth ods by a significant margin. The code is publicly available now.