# CellSplat4D: PSF-Aware 4D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse Robotic Live-Cell Imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04199 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04199/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [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)
- [HexPlane: A Fast Representation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09632/) (2023)
- [Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10642/) (2023)
- [Noise2Void - Learning Denoising from Single Noisy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10980/) (2018)
- [Spacetime Gaussian Feature Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16812/) (2023)
- [Super SloMo: High Quality Estimation of Multiple Intermediate Frames for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00080/) (2017)
- [FSGS: Real-Time Few-shot View Synthesis using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00451/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09591/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06294/) (2020)
- [4D-Rotor Gaussian Splatting: Towards Efficient Novel View Synthesis for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03307/) (2024)
- [FILM: Frame Interpolation for Large Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04901/) (2022)
- [ActiveNeRF: Learning where to See with Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08546/) (2022)
- [Pixel-GS: Density Control with Pixel-aware Gradient for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15530/) (2024)
- [Radiative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient X-ray Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04116/) (2024)
- [4DRGS: 4D Radiative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Vessel Reconstruction from Sparse-View Dynamic DSA Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12919/) (2024)
- [GaussianPile: A Unified Sparse Gaussian Splatting Framework for Slice-based Volumetric Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20611/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A robotic microscope watching living cells cannot afford to look as often as it would like. Every volume it acquires costs photons the specimen does not get back, and time owed to other wells. What such a platform exists to produce is a record of individual cells through time: which cell is which from one volume to the next, and which cell divided into which two. Sampling sparsely breaks that record exactly where it matters, and the fault lies in the acquisition schedule rather than in the analysis software. We fill the gaps by reconstructing them, fitting a 4D Gaussian model to whatever volumes the hardware could afford. The model is a cloud of light-emitting blobs, each carrying a position, a shape and a lifetime. Being continuous in time, it renders any missing volume on demand, decoupling how often the robot analyses from how often it can afford to look. The microscope's point-spread function is measured from the data rather than inherited from acquisition metadata or left to the optimizer, because metadata inflates it and the optimizer cannot recover it at all: a wider blur around a smaller blob fits the images equally well. Each blob's lifetime is stored in frames rather than as a fraction of the recording, so that it denotes a fixed duration on any sequence. Unmeasured timesteps are supervised at coarse scale by a 3D U-Net that predicts the intermediate volume directly and estimates no motion field, since a dividing cell becomes two and no motion describes that. On two Cell Tracking Challenge sequences, a C. elegans embryo and a Chinese Hamster Ovarian (CHO), with fidelity scored per cell nucleus, our reconstruction holds the highest nucleus fidelity at every distance from an acquired frame, has the flattest decay across the gap, and best recovers focal planes it was never shown with graceful degradation across the gap.