# Optimized Minimal 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16924 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16924/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [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)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [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)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [DreamGaussian: Generative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16653/) (2023)
- [SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03312/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (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)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (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)
- [Shape of Motion: 4D Reconstruction from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13764/) (2024)
- [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)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09591/) (2024)
- [A Hierarchical 3D Gaussian Representation for Real-Time Rendering of Very Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12080/) (2024)
- [Mini-Splatting: Representing Scenes with a Constrained Number of Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14166/) (2024)
- [HAC: Hash-grid Assisted Context for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14530/) (2024)
- [Taming 3DGS: High-Quality Radiance Fields with Limited Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15643/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [iLRM: An Iterative Large 3D Reconstruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23277/) (2025)
- [Mobile-GS: Real-time Gaussian Splatting for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11531/) (2026)
- [GaussianPOP: Principled Simplification Framework for Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting via Error Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06830/) (2026)
- [REFINE: Super-efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting Pruning via Rendering-Free Primitive Importance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09074/) (2026)
- [SUCCESS-GS: Survey of Compactness and Compression for Efficient Static and Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07197/) (2025)
- [Monte Carlo Energy Aggregation for Mobile 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30017/) (2026)
- [Provable Pruning for Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting via Coresets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02721/) (2026)
- [Learning Hierarchical Sparse Transform Coding for 3DGS Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22908/) (2025)
- [Local-GS: Accelerating 3D Gaussian Splatting via Tile-Local Warp Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16566/) (2026)
- [GaussLite: Online Task-Conditioned 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Robotic Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30809/) (2026)
- [Gaussians on a Diet: High-Quality Memory-Bounded 3D Gaussian Splatting Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20046/) (2026)
- [MesonGS++: Post-training Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting with Hyperparameter Searching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26799/) (2026)
- [Seeing What Matters: Perceptual Wrapper with Common Randomness for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11782/) (2026)
- [Rectifying Mask via Entropy for Distractor-Free 3DGS in Ambiguous Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29496/) (2026)
- [Compact Feed-Forward 3D Gaussians via Saliency-Guided Primitive Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10712/) (2026)
- [Gaussian Splatting-based Volumetric Video Compression with Sparse 4D Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33969/) (2026)
- [SCION: Scene Composition with Instanced Neural Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02322/) (2026)
- [Mobile-4DGS: Unified Static-Dynamic Real-time Mobile Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05289/) (2026)
- [SplatQ: Interaction-Aware Pruning of 3D Gaussian Splatting via Quadratic Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13503/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful representation for real-time, high-performance rendering, enabling a wide range of applications. However, representing 3D scenes with numerous explicit Gaussian primitives imposes significant storage and memory overhead. Recent studies have shown that high-quality rendering can be achieved with a substantially reduced number of Gaussians when represented with high-precision attributes. Nevertheless, existing 3DGS compression methods still rely on a relatively large number of Gaussians, focusing primarily on attribute compression. This is because a smaller set of Gaussians becomes increasingly sensitive to lossy attribute compression, leading to severe quality degradation. Since the number of Gaussians is directly tied to computational costs, it is essential to reduce the number of Gaussians effectively rather than only optimizing storage. In this paper, we propose Optimized Minimal Gaussians representation (OMG), which significantly reduces storage while using a minimal number of primitives. First, we determine the distinct Gaussian from the near ones, minimizing redundancy without sacrificing quality. Second, we propose a compact and precise attribute representation that efficiently captures both continuity and irregularity among primitives. Additionally, we propose a sub-vector quantization technique for improved irregularity representation, maintaining fast training with a negligible codebook size. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OMG reduces storage requirements by nearly 50% compared to the previous state-of-the-art and enables 600+ FPS rendering while maintaining high rendering quality. Our source code is available at https://maincold2.github.io/omg/.