# GaussianGAN: Real-Time Photorealistic controllable Human Avatars

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01681 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01681/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07920/) (2023)
- [3DGS-Avatar: Animatable Avatars via Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09228/) (2023)
- [Learning a Multi-View Stereo Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05375/) (2017)
- [GaussianAvatar: Towards Realistic Human Avatar Modeling from a Single Video via Animatable 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02134/) (2023)
- [TAVA: Template-free Animatable Volumetric Actors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08929/) (2022)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [GauHuman: Articulated Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02973/) (2023)
- [Liquid Warping GAN: A Unified Framework for Human Motion Imitation, Appearance Transfer and Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12224/) (2019)
- [Controllable Person Image Synthesis with Attribute-Decomposed GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12267/) (2020)
- [ARAH: Animatable Volume Rendering of Articulated Human SDFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10036/) (2022)
- [Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03704/) (2023)
- [Differentiable Rendering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12057/) (2020)
- [Structured Local Radiance Fields for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14478/) (2022)
- [ViTGAN: Training GANs with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04589/) (2021)
- [Human Gaussian Splatting: Real-time Rendering of Animatable Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17113/) (2023)
- [ASH: Animatable Gaussian Splats for Efficient and Photoreal Human Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05941/) (2023)
- [MonoHuman: Animatable Human Neural Field from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02001/) (2023)
- [Dense Pose Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01995/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Photorealistic and controllable human avatars have gained popularity in the research community thanks to rapid advances in neural rendering, providing fast and realistic synthesis tools. However, a limitation of current solutions is the presence of noticeable blurring. To solve this problem, we propose GaussianGAN, an animatable avatar approach developed for photorealistic rendering of people in real-time. We introduce a novel Gaussian splatting densification strategy to build Gaussian points from the surface of cylindrical structures around estimated skeletal limbs. Given the camera calibration, we render an accurate semantic segmentation with our novel view segmentation module. Finally, a UNet generator uses the rendered Gaussian splatting features and the segmentation maps to create photorealistic digital avatars. Our method runs in real-time with a rendering speed of 79 FPS. It outperforms previous methods regarding visual perception and quality, achieving a state-of-the-art results in terms of a pixel fidelity of 32.94db on the ZJU Mocap dataset and 33.39db on the Thuman4 dataset.