# GaussianForest: Hierarchical-Hybrid 3D Gaussian Splatting for Compressed Scene Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08759 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08759/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [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)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [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)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (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)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [Neural 3D Mesh Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07566/) (2017)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [Differentiable Surface Splatting for Point-based Geometry Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04173/) (2019)
- [NeRF-Editing: Geometry Editing of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04978/) (2022)
- [NerfingMVS: Guided Optimization of Neural Radiance Fields for Indoor Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01129/) (2021)
- [InfoNeRF: Ray Entropy Minimization for Few-Shot Neural Volume Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15399/) (2021)
- [RePaint-NeRF: NeRF Editting via Semantic Masks and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05668/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [PCGS: Progressive Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08511/) (2025)
- [TALO: Pushing 3D Vision Foundation Models Towards Globally Consistent Online Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02341/) (2025)
- [HGC-Avatar: Hierarchical Gaussian Compression for Streamable Dynamic 3D Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16463/) (2025)
- [Unfolding 3D Gaussian Splatting via Iterative Gaussian Synopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11685/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The field of novel-view synthesis has recently witnessed the emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting, which represents scenes in a point-based manner and renders through rasterization. This methodology, in contrast to Radiance Fields that rely on ray tracing, demonstrates superior rendering quality and speed. However, the explicit and unstructured nature of 3D Gaussians poses a significant storage challenge, impeding its broader application. To address this challenge, we introduce the Gaussian-Forest modeling framework, which hierarchically represents a scene as a forest of hybrid 3D Gaussians. Each hybrid Gaussian retains its unique explicit attributes while sharing implicit ones with its sibling Gaussians, thus optimizing parameterization with significantly fewer variables. Moreover, adaptive growth and pruning strategies are designed, ensuring detailed representation in complex regions and a notable reduction in the number of required Gaussians. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Gaussian-Forest not only maintains comparable speed and quality but also achieves a compression rate surpassing 10 times, marking a significant advancement in efficient scene modeling. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Xian-Bei/GaussianForest.