COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting

Yang Fu, Sifei Liu, Amey Kulkarni, Jan Kautz, Alexei A. Efros, Xiaolong Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 20796-20805

While neural rendering has led to impressive advances in scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis it relies heavily on accurately pre-computed camera poses. To relax this constraint multiple efforts have been made to train Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) without pre-processed camera poses. However the implicit representations of NeRFs provide extra challenges to optimize the 3D structure and camera poses at the same time. On the other hand the recently proposed 3D Gaussian Splatting provides new opportunities given its explicit point cloud representations. This paper leverages both the explicit geometric representation and the continuity of the input video stream to perform novel view synthesis without any SfM preprocessing. We process the input frames in a sequential manner and progressively grow the 3D Gaussians set by taking one input frame at a time without the need to pre-compute the camera poses. Our method significantly improves over previous approaches in view synthesis and camera pose estimation under large motion changes. Our project page is: https: //oasisyang.github.io/colmap-free-3dgs.