No Redundancy, No Stall: Lightweight Streaming 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-time Rendering

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-quality rendering of 3D scenes and is getting increasing adoption in domains like autonomous driving and embodied intelligence. However, 3DGS still faces major efficiency challenges when faced with high frame rate requirements and resource-constrained edge deployment. To enable efficient 3DGS, in this paper, we propose LS-Gaussian, an algorithm/hardware co-design framework for lightweight streaming 3D rendering. LS-Gaussian is motivated by the core observation that 3DGS suffers from substantial computation redundancy and stalls. On one hand, in practical scenarios, high-frame-rate 3DGS is often applied in settings where a camera observes and renders the same scene continuously but from slightly different viewpoints. Therefore, instead of rendering each frame separately, LS-Gaussian proposes a viewpoint transformation algorithm that leverages inter-frame continuity for efficient sparse rendering. On the other hand, as different tiles within an image are rendered in parallel but have imbalanced workloads, frequent hardware stalls also slow down the rendering process. LS-Gaussian predicts the workload for each tile based on viewpoint transformation to enable more balanced parallel computation and co-designs a customized 3DGS accelerator to support the workload-aware mapping in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate that LS-Gaussian achieves 5.41x speedup over the edge GPU baseline on average and up to 17.3x speedup with the customized accelerator, while incurring only minimal visual quality degradation.