pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction

David Charatan, Sizhe Lester Li, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Vincent Sitzmann; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 19457-19467

We introduce pixelSplat a feed-forward model that learns to reconstruct 3D radiance fields parameterized by 3D Gaussian primitives from pairs of images. Our model features real-time and memory-efficient rendering for scalable training as well as fast 3D reconstruction at inference time. To overcome local minima inherent to sparse and locally supported representations we predict a dense probability distribution over 3D and sample Gaussian means from that probability distribution. We make this sampling operation differentiable via a reparameterization trick allowing us to back-propagate gradients through the Gaussian splatting representation. We benchmark our method on wide-baseline novel view synthesis on the real-world RealEstate10k and ACID datasets where we outperform state-of-the-art light field transformers and accelerate rendering by 2.5 orders of magnitude while reconstructing an interpretable and editable 3D radiance field. Additional materials can be found on the anonymous project website (pixelsplat.github.io).