# ForestSplats: Deformable transient field for Gaussian Splatting in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06179/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07920/) (2023)
- [Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10379/) (2020)
- [One-2-3-45++: Fast Single Image to 3D Objects with Consistent Multi-View Generation and 3D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07885/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)
- [EmerNeRF: Emergent Spatial-Temporal Scene Decomposition via Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02077/) (2023)
- [Taming 3DGS: High-Quality Radiance Fields with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15643/) (2024)
- [VR-GS: A Physical Dynamics-Aware Interactive Gaussian Splatting System in Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16663/) (2024)
- [WildGaussians: 3D Gaussian Splatting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08447/) (2024)
- [SUDS: Scalable Urban Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14536/) (2023)
- [Hallucinated Neural Radiance Fields in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15246/) (2021)
- [F2-NeRF: Fast Neural Radiance Field Training with Free Camera Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15951/) (2023)
- [Gaussian in the Wild: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Unconstrained Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15704/) (2024)
- [Pixel-GS: Density Control with Pixel-aware Gradient for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15530/) (2024)
- [RobustNeRF: Ignoring Distractors with Robust Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00833/) (2023)
- [NeRF On-the-go: Exploiting Uncertainty for Distractor-free NeRFs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18715/) (2024)
- [SEEDS: Superpixels Extracted via Energy-Driven Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.3848/) (2013)
- [SWAG: Splatting in the Wild images with Appearance-conditioned Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10427/) (2024)
- [SpotlessSplats: Ignoring Distractors in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20055/) (2024)
- [Wild-GS: Real-Time Novel View Synthesis from Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10373/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Sparse View Distractor-Free Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01603/) (2026)
- [3DGS-HPC: Distractor-free 3D Gaussian Splatting with Hybrid Patch-wise Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07587/) (2026)
- [DF3DV-1K: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Distractor-Free Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13416/) (2026)
- [Difix3D-W: Distractor-Free Few-Shot 3D Gaussian Splatting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27422/) (2026)
- [Rectifying Mask via Entropy for Distractor-Free 3DGS in Ambiguous Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29496/) (2026)
- [Per-View Gaussian Predictions Enable Training-Free Distractor Filtering in Feed-Forward 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26951/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has emerged, showing real-time rendering speeds and high-quality results in static scenes. Although 3D-GS shows effectiveness in static scenes, their performance significantly degrades in real-world environments due to transient objects, lighting variations, and diverse levels of occlusion. To tackle this, existing methods estimate occluders or transient elements by leveraging pre-trained models or integrating additional transient field pipelines. However, these methods still suffer from two defects: 1) Using semantic features from the Vision Foundation model (VFM) causes additional computational costs. 2) The transient field requires significant memory to handle transient elements with per-view Gaussians and struggles to define clear boundaries for occluders, solely relying on photometric errors. To address these problems, we propose ForestSplats, a novel approach that leverages the deformable transient field and a superpixel-aware mask to efficiently represent transient elements in the 2D scene across unconstrained image collections and effectively decompose static scenes from transient distractors without VFM. We designed the transient field to be deformable, capturing per-view transient elements. Furthermore, we introduce a superpixel-aware mask that clearly defines the boundaries of occluders by considering photometric errors and superpixels. Additionally, we propose uncertainty-aware densification to avoid generating Gaussians within the boundaries of occluders during densification. Through extensive experiments across several benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that ForestSplats outperforms existing methods without VFM and shows significant memory efficiency in representing transient elements.