Decomposing Densification in Gaussian Splatting for Faster 3D Scene Reconstruction

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) has emerged as a powerful representation for high-quality scene reconstruction, offering compelling rendering quality. However, the training process of GS often suffers from slow convergence due to inefficient densification and suboptimal spatial distribution of Gaussian primitives. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of the split and clone operations during the densification phase, revealing their distinct roles in balancing detail preservation and computational efficiency. Building upon this analysis, we propose a global-to-local densification strategy, which facilitates more efficient growth of Gaussians across the scene space, promoting both global coverage and local refinement. To cooperate with the proposed densification strategy and promote sufficient diffusion of Gaussian primitives in space, we introduce an energy-guided coarse-to-fine multi-resolution training framework, which gradually increases resolution based on energy density in 2D images. Additionally, we dynamically prune unnecessary Gaussian primitives to speed up the training. Extensive experiments on MipNeRF-360, Deep Blending, and Tanks & Temples datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly accelerates training,achieving over 2x speedup with fewer Gaussian primitives and superior reconstruction performance.