PAGaS: Pixel-Aligned 1DoF Gaussian Splatting for Depth Refinement
Authors: David Recasens, Robert Maier, Aljaz Bozic, Stephane Grabli, Javier Civera, Tony Tung, Edmond Boyer
Organizations: University of Zaragoza
Abstract
Gaussian Splatting (GS) has emerged as an efficient approach for high-quality novel view synthesis. While early GS variants struggled to accurately model the scene's geometry, recent advancements constraining the Gaussians' spread and shapes, such as 2D Gaussian Splatting, have significantly improved geometric fidelity. In this paper, we present Pixel-Aligned 1DoF Gaussian Splatting (PAGaS) that adapts the GS representation from novel view synthesis to the multi-view stereo depth task. Our key contribution is modeling a pixel's depth using one-degree-of-freedom (1DoF) Gaussians that remain tightly constrained during optimization. Unlike existing approaches, our Gaussians' positions and sizes are restricted by the back-projected pixel volumes, leaving depth as the sole degree of freedom to optimize. PAGaS produces highly detailed depths, as illustrated in Figure 1. We quantitatively validate these improvements on top of reference geometric and learning-based multi-view stereo baselines on challenging 3D reconstruction benchmarks. Code: davidrecasens.github.io/pagas
3D Gaussians have become a powerful scene representation for real-time splatting and high-quality novel-view synthesis. This has motivated generalizable splatting -- methods that adapt feed-forward geometry prediction networks to produce per-pixel Gaussians from a set of images. However, most generalizable splatting pipelines are supervised primarily through a view-synthesis loss to predict Gaussian orientation, anisotropic scale, opacity, and appearance in addition to their locations. We show that this learning objective is under-constrained. Models trained with view synthesis alone produce splats whose orientations and scales have no geometric connotation. The result is that, while producing decent view-synthesis performance, nearly all generalizable splatting methods produce geometrically inaccurate and misaligned Gaussians. We introduce G3Splat, a geometry-consistent generalizable splatting framework that addresses these degeneracies through differentiable geometric priors on the predicted 3D Gaussians, making the learning problem well-posed. These priors encourage the per-pixel splats to remain on their viewing rays and to orient themselves in accordance with local surfaces. Our priors are architecture-agnostic and can be incorporated into any previously studied geometric backbone for generalizable splatting, as well as different scene representations. We test G3Splat with both DUSt3R-style and VGGT-style backbones to predict pixel-aligned full-rank 3DGS as well as surfel-like 2DGS. Trained on RE10K, G3Splat produces Gaussian splats with significantly higher geometric fidelity than baselines, providing state-of-the-art novel-view depth, mesh reconstruction, and relative pose estimation performance while preserving novel-view synthesis quality, as evaluated on datasets such as ACID and ScanNet. Code and pretrained models are released on our project page.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved remarkable success in real-time novel view synthesis, yet it suffers from severe overfitting under sparse-view settings due to insufficient geometric constraints. While recent methods introduce monocular depth priors to mitigate this, they inherently struggle with scale ambiguity and cross-view inconsistency, leading to defective geometry. In this paper, we propose StereoGS, a novel sparse-view 3DGS framework that integrates stereo priors to establish reliable binocular consistency. Unlike scale-agnostic monocular constraints, StereoGS introduces a Stereo Depth Regularization by constructing virtual stereo pairs during optimization and leveraging a foundation stereo model to enforce absolute scale and binocular-consistent structures. To further suppress overfitting and eliminate redundant primitives, we design a Gradient-Aware Opacity Decay strategy that dynamically penalizes Gaussians based on their relative opacity gradient magnitudes. Combined with a Consistency-Aware Dense Initialization using zero-shot multi-view depth estimation, StereoGS effectively anchors primitives to accurate scene surfaces. Extensive experiments on LLFF, DTU, Mip-NeRF360, and Blender datasets demonstrate that StereoGS achieves state-of-the-art performance in sparse-view settings without incurring any additional inference overhead. Project Page: https://stringerywh00.github.io/StereoGS_project_page/
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful technique for generating photorealistic renderings of a scene in real-time. However, the volumetric nature of 3DGS limits its ability to accurately capture surface geometry. To address this, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) was proposed to enable view-consistent and geometrically accurate surface reconstruction from multi-view images. However, 2DGS can be sensitive to the initialization of the Gaussian primitives. Reliance on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) initializations, which can produce poor estimates on challenging image sets, may lead to subpar results. In this work, we enhance 2DGS by incorporating monocular depth and normal priors to improve both geometric accuracy and robustness. We propose a depth-guided initialization strategy for Gaussians and introduce a clustering-based technique for pruning degenerate Gaussians. We evaluate our method on the DTU dataset, where it achieves state-of-the-art results in mesh reconstruction while preserving high-quality novel view synthesis.