2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields

Binbin Huang, Zehao Yu, Anpei Chen, Andreas Geiger, Shenghua Gao

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently revolutionized radiance field reconstruction, achieving high quality novel view synthesis and fast rendering speed. However, 3DGS fails to accurately represent surfaces due to the multi-view inconsistent nature of 3D Gaussians. We present 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS), a novel approach to model and reconstruct geometrically accurate radiance fields from multi-view images. Our key idea is to collapse the 3D volume into a set of 2D oriented planar Gaussian disks. Unlike 3D Gaussians, 2D Gaussians provide view-consistent geometry while modeling surfaces intrinsically. To accurately recover thin surfaces and achieve stable optimization, we introduce a perspective-accurate 2D splatting process utilizing ray-splat intersection and rasterization. Additionally, we incorporate depth distortion and normal consistency terms to further enhance the quality of the reconstructions. We demonstrate that our differentiable renderer allows for noise-free and detailed geometry reconstruction while maintaining competitive appearance quality, fast training speed, and real-time rendering. Project page at https://surfsplatting.github.io.