# CAGS: Color-Adaptive Volumetric Video Streaming with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09279 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09279/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2026.

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

- [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)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (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)
- [A Hierarchical 3D Gaussian Representation for Real-Time Rendering of Very Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12080/) (2024)
- [HAC: Hash-grid Assisted Context for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14530/) (2024)
- [Editable Free-viewpoint Video Using a Layered Neural Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14786/) (2021)
- [Reducing the Memory Footprint of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17074/) (2024)
- [Streaming Radiance Fields for 3D Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14831/) (2022)
- [Variable Bitrate Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07707/) (2022)
- [NeRF-SR: High-Quality Neural Radiance Fields using Supersampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01759/) (2021)
- [CompGS: Efficient 3D Scene Representation via Compressed Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09458/) (2024)
- [Deep Exemplar-based Video Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09909/) (2019)
- [Representing Long Volumetric Video with Temporal Gaussian Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09608/) (2024)
- [Grid4D: 4D Decomposed Hash Encoding for High-Fidelity Dynamic Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20815/) (2024)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting with Scale-aware Residual Field and Adaptive Optimization for Real-time Rendering of Temporally Complex Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06299/) (2024)
- [AcinoSet: A 3D Pose Estimation Dataset and Baseline Models for Cheetahs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13282/) (2021)
- [V^3: Viewing Volumetric Videos on Mobiles via Streamable 2D Dynamic Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13648/) (2024)
- [LetsGo: Large-Scale Garage Modeling and Rendering via LiDAR-Assisted Gaussian Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09748/) (2024)
- [QUEEN: QUantized Efficient ENcoding of Dynamic Gaussians for Streaming Free-viewpoint Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04469/) (2024)
- [Sketch and Patch: Efficient 3D Gaussian Representation for Man-Made Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13045/) (2025)
- [Robo360: A 3D Omnispective Multi-Material Robotic Manipulation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06686/) (2023)
- [LoopGaussian: Creating 3D Cinemagraph with Multi-view Images via Eulerian Motion Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08966/) (2024)
- [VQ-NeRF: Neural Reflectance Decomposition and Editing with Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11864/) (2023)
- [A First Look at Commercial 5G Performance on Smartphones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07532/) (2019)
- [SizeGS: Size-aware Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting via Mixed Integer Programming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05808/) (2024)
- [Topology-Aware Optimization of Gaussian Primitives for Human-Centric Volumetric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07653/) (2025)
- [TrackerSplat: Exploiting Point Tracking for Fast and Robust Dynamic 3D Gaussians Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02586/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Volumetric video (VV) streaming enables real-time, immersive access to remote 3D environments, powering telepresence, ecological monitoring, and robotic teleoperation. These applications turn VV streaming into a real-time interface to remote physical environments, imposing new system-level demands for photorealistic scene representation, low-latency interaction, and robust performance under heterogeneous networks. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely used for real-time photorealistic rendering, offering superior visual quality and rendering performance, but it faces challenges due to bandwidth consumption. Furthermore, as the foundation of adaptive VV streaming, existing Levels of Detail (LoD) methods based on density are not well-suited to Gaussian representations, leading to visible gaps and severe quality degradation. Recent studies have also explored attribute compression techniques to reduce bandwidth consumption. Our preliminary studies reveal that aggressive attribute compression primarily causes color distortion, which can be effectively corrected in the rendered image using a reference image. Motivated by these findings, we propose a novel Color-Adaptive scheme for adaptive VV streaming that uses vector quantization (VQ) to establish LoDs and correct color distortions with low-resolution reference images. We further present CAGS, an adaptive VV streaming system compatible with diverse Gaussian representations, which integrates the Color-Adaptive scheme by rendering reference images on the streaming server and performing color restoration on the client. Extensive experiments on our prototype system demonstrate that CAGS outperforms the existing adaptive streaming systems in PSNR by 5~20 dB under fluctuating bandwidth, operates significantly faster than existing scalable Gaussian compression methods, and generalizes across different Gaussian representations.