# CAT-3DGS: A Context-Adaptive Triplane Approach to Rate-Distortion-Optimized 3DGS Compression

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00357 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00357/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [Variational image compression with a scale hyperprior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01436/) (2018)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02436/) (2023)
- [Octree-GS: Towards Consistent Real-time Rendering with LOD-Structured 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17898/) (2024)
- [BungeeNeRF: Progressive Neural Radiance Field for Extreme Multi-scale Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05504/) (2021)
- [HAC: Hash-grid Assisted Context for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14530/) (2024)
- [EAGLES: Efficient Accelerated 3D Gaussians with Lightweight EncodingS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04564/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Scene Representation via Self-Organizing Gaussian Grids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13299/) (2023)
- [ContextGS: Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting with Anchor Level Context Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20721/) (2024)
- [CompGS: Efficient 3D Scene Representation via Compressed Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09458/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Rate-Distortion Optimized 3D Gaussian Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01597/) (2024)
- [Trimming the Fat: Efficient Compression of 3D Gaussian Splats through Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18214/) (2024)
- [Binary Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07581/) (2023)
- [F-3DGS: Factorized Coordinates and Representations for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17083/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [LongSplat: Robust Unposed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Casual Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14041/) (2025)
- [PCGS: Progressive Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08511/) (2025)
- [Skyfall-GS: Synthesizing Immersive 3D Urban Scenes from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15869/) (2025)
- [NeuralGS: Bridging Neural Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting for Compact 3D Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23162/) (2025)
- [ReCon-GS: Continuum-Preserved Gaussian Streaming for Fast and Compact Reconstruction of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24325/) (2025)
- [GSCodec Studio: A Modular Framework for Gaussian Splat Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01822/) (2025)
- [AdaGaR: Adaptive Gabor Representation for Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00796/) (2026)
- [D-FCGS: Feedforward Compression of Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Free-Viewpoint Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05859/) (2025)
- [Improving 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression by Scene-Adaptive Lattice Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13482/) (2025)
- [StealthAttack: Robust 3D Gaussian Splatting Poisoning via Density-Guided Illusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02314/) (2025)
- [Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression with Long-Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00877/) (2025)
- [Motion Matters: Compact Gaussian Streaming for Free-Viewpoint Video Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16533/) (2025)
- [CAT-3DGS Pro: A New Benchmark for Efficient 3DGS Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12862/) (2025)
- [TED-4DGS: Temporally Activated and Embedding-based Deformation for 4DGS Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05446/) (2025)
- [Voxify3D: Pixel Art Meets Volumetric Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07834/) (2025)
- [POTR: Post-Training 3DGS Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14821/) (2026)
- [GaussianPOP: Principled Simplification Framework for Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting via Error Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06830/) (2026)
- [CompMarkGS: Robust Watermarking for Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12836/) (2025)
- [GFix: Perceptually Enhanced Gaussian Splatting Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06953/) (2025)
- [SUCCESS-GS: Survey of Compactness and Compression for Efficient Static and Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07197/) (2025)
- [Splatwizard: A Benchmark Toolkit for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24742/) (2025)
- [Learning Hierarchical Sparse Transform Coding for 3DGS Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22908/) (2025)
- [CylinderSplat: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Cylindrical Triplanes for Panoramic Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05882/) (2026)
- [Every Camera Effect, Every Time, All at Once: 4D Gaussian Ray Tracing for Physics-based Camera Effect Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10759/) (2025)
- [P-4DGS: Predictive 4D Gaussian Splatting with 90× Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10030/) (2025)
- [SCAR-GS: Spatial Context Attention for Residuals in Progressive Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04348/) (2026)
- [CSGaussian: Progressive Rate-Distortion Compression and Segmentation for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12814/) (2026)
- [HPC: Hierarchical Point-based Latent Representation for Streaming Dynamic Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00671/) (2026)
- [ProGS: Towards Progressive Coding for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09703/) (2026)
- [LG-HCC: Local Geometry-Aware Hierarchical Context Compression for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28431/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a promising 3D representation. Much research has been focused on reducing its storage requirements and memory footprint. However, the needs to compress and transmit the 3DGS representation to the remote side are overlooked. This new application calls for rate-distortion-optimized 3DGS compression. How to quantize and entropy encode sparse Gaussian primitives in the 3D space remains largely unexplored. Few early attempts resort to the hyperprior framework from learned image compression. But, they fail to utilize fully the inter and intra correlation inherent in Gaussian primitives. Built on ScaffoldGS, this work, termed CAT-3DGS, introduces a context-adaptive triplane approach to their rate-distortion-optimized coding. It features multi-scale triplanes, oriented according to the principal axes of Gaussian primitives in the 3D space, to capture their inter correlation (i.e. spatial correlation) for spatial autoregressive coding in the projected 2D planes. With these triplanes serving as the hyperprior, we further perform channel-wise autoregressive coding to leverage the intra correlation within each individual Gaussian primitive. Our CAT-3DGS incorporates a view frequency-aware masking mechanism. It actively skips from coding those Gaussian primitives that potentially have little impact on the rendering quality. When trained end-to-end to strike a good rate-distortion trade-off, our CAT-3DGS achieves the state-of-the-art compression performance on the commonly used real-world datasets.