# Perceptual Quality Assessment of 3D Gaussian Splatting: A Subjective Dataset and Prediction Metric

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08032 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08032/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/) (2023)
- [EAGLES: Efficient Accelerated 3D Gaussians with Lightweight EncodingS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04564/) (2023)
- [RAPIQUE: Rapid and Accurate Video Quality Prediction of User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10955/) (2021)
- [Point Cloud Quality Assessment: Dataset Construction and Learning-based No-Reference Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11895/) (2020)
- [DISTWAR: Fast Differentiable Rendering on Raster-based Rendering Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05345/) (2023)
- [MirrorGaussian: Reflecting 3D Gaussians for Reconstructing Mirror Reflections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11921/) (2024)
- [A Benchmark for Gaussian Splatting Compression and Quality Assessment Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14197/) (2024)
- [GS-QA: Comprehensive Quality Assessment Benchmark for Gaussian Splatting View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13196/) (2025)
- [CLIP-PCQA: Exploring Subjective-Aligned Vision-Language Modeling for Point Cloud Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10071/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Aes3D: Aesthetic Assessment in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05155/) (2026)
- [SpatialQ: Understanding 3D Gaussian Splatting Scene Quality via Visual-based MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26595/) (2026)
- [GS-PQM: A Parameter-Domain Quality Metric for Compressed Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00195/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid advancement of 3D visualization, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a leading technique for real-time, high-fidelity rendering. While prior research has emphasized algorithmic performance and visual fidelity, the perceptual quality of 3DGS-rendered content, especially under varying reconstruction conditions, remains largely underexplored. In practice, factors such as viewpoint sparsity, limited training iterations, point downsampling, noise, and color distortions can significantly degrade visual quality, yet their perceptual impact has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we present 3DGS-QA, the first subjective quality assessment dataset for 3DGS. It comprises 225 degraded reconstructions across 15 object types, enabling a controlled investigation of common distortion factors. Based on this dataset, we introduce a no-reference quality prediction model that directly operates on native 3D Gaussian primitives, without requiring rendered images or ground-truth references. Our model extracts spatial and photometric cues from the Gaussian representation to estimate perceived quality in a structure-aware manner. We further benchmark existing quality assessment methods, spanning both traditional and learning-based approaches. Experimental results show that our method consistently achieves superior performance, highlighting its robustness and effectiveness for 3DGS content evaluation. The dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/diaoyn/3DGSQA to facilitate future research in 3DGS quality assessment.