about
When Gaussian Meets Surfel: Ultra-Fast High-Fidelity Radiance Field Rendering (arxiv.org)
2 points by ibobev on Apr 28, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Flat 2D discs carry a scene's shape and color, while a few 3D Gaussian blobs add fine detail; discs draw first, then blobs fill each pixel without sorting. It renders quickly and keeps images steady as the view moves, avoiding the popping that sorting causes.

Abstract · When Gaussian Meets Surfel: Ultra-fast High-fidelity Radiance Field Rendering

We introduce Gaussian-enhanced Surfels (GESs), a bi-scale representation for radiance field rendering, wherein a set of 2D opaque surfels with view-dependent colors represent the coarse-scale geometry and appearance of scenes, and a few 3D Gaussians surrounding the surfels supplement fine-scale appearance details. The rendering with GESs consists of two passes -- surfels are first rasterized through a standard graphics pipeline to produce depth and color maps, and then Gaussians are splatted with depth testing and color accumulation on each pixel order independently. The optimization of GESs from multi-view images is performed through an elaborate coarse-to-fine procedure, faithfully capturing rich scene appearance. The entirely sorting-free rendering of GESs not only achieves very fast rates, but also produces view-consistent images, successfully avoiding popping artifacts under view changes. The basic GES representation can be easily extended to achieve anti-aliasing in rendering (Mip-GES), boosted rendering speeds (Speedy-GES) and compact storage (Compact-GES), and reconstruct better scene geometries by replacing 3D Gaussians with 2D Gaussians (2D-GES). Experimental results show that GESs advance the state-of-the-arts as a compelling representation for ultra-fast high-fidelity radiance field rendering.

Keyang Ye, Tianjia Shao, Kun Zhou
arXiv:2504.17545 · cs.CV · submitted Apr 24, 2025 · updated Dec 14, 2025
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN