Leveraging NeRF-Rendered Images for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Neural radiance field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) are two mainstream approaches for novel view synthesis. They often show complementary performance, i.e., 3DGS demonstrating faster rendering speed and NeRF demonstrating higher rendering quality. Motivated by this, we propose leveraging NeRF-rendered images for 3DGS. Specifically, we target street scenes and utilize a pre-trained street-specific NeRF method to produce training images for a target 3DGS method. In our 3DGS training, NeRF-rendered images are used to remove transient objects in street-level input views and to generate bird's-eye views as additional views, inheriting the higher-quality rendering of NeRF into 3DGS. We further incorporate a diffusion-based image enhancement to improve the image quality of the additional views. Experimental results on one synthetic and two real datasets demonstrate that our proposed method improves street-scene rendering while preserving the speed of 3DGS and the quality of NeRF.