Gaussian Splatting

Gaussian Splatting is a rendering technique for constructing 3D scenes from photos. Specifically, it is a volume rendering technique that directly renders volume data without the use of traditional polygon meshes.

It involves creating discrete point clouds (i.e. points in a 3D scene) from structure-from-motion methods and then modeling these points as Gaussian distributions. Tweaking the parameters of these points can squish and stretch these points.

To achieve the optimal parameters that accurately captures the real-life scene for these splats, gradient descent is used with the similarity to the references images from various angles being the loss function.