Topo-GS: Continuous Volumetric Embedding of High-Dimensional Data via Topological Gaussian Splatting
Authors: João Paulo Gois, Luis Gustavo Nonato
Organizations: Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), Santo André, Brazil · Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC), Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Carlos, Brazil
Abstract
Dimensionality reduction algorithms map high-dimensional data into visualizable 2D or 3D spaces, but traditionally rely on a discrete point-cloud paradigm. This discrete abstraction is susceptible to visual occlusion and artificial discontinuities, often failing to represent the continuous density of the underlying manifold. To address these limitations, we introduce Topo-GS, a framework that repurposes 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to cast multidimensional projection as a meshless volumetric reconstruction process. Instead of standard photometric losses, Topo-GS is driven by local geometric constraints. By solving orthogonal Procrustes targets, the optimization enforces an As-Rigid-As-Possible prior while explicitly aligning the spatial covariance of each Gaussian to the local tangent space. Recognizing that unrolling data of varying intrinsic dimensionalities requires distinct spatial treatments, we utilize a topology-aware strategy that tailors the loss formulation to preserve either continuous 1D trajectories or cohesive 2D surfaces. Quantitative and visual evaluations demonstrate that Topo-GS successfully transforms discrete scatter plots into continuous volumetric representations, where inherent projection distortions explicitly manifest as observable geometric variations, while preserving local topological fidelity comparable to discrete baselines.
Extracting structured, parametric 3D representations from raw images remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. While recent advancements in the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) pipeline integrate planar primitives to yield compact and editable geometry, these approaches typically treat planes as isolated, discrete sets. This lack of topological connectivity hinders robust geometric reasoning, leading to fragmented reconstructions and misaligned boundaries that fall short of the precision for rigorous spatial analysis and professional design workflows. To address this, we introduce TopoGS, the first 3DGS framework to explicitly integrate both planar and topological constraints for coherent 3D reconstruction. Specifically, we extract global 2D topological relationships from multi-view image segmentations and anchor Gaussian primitives to these structural elements. This formulation enables the joint optimization of plane parameters, rendering fidelity, and topological adjacency. By enforcing strict multi-view consistency alongside these topological constraints, our method significantly mitigates geometric misalignments and produces connected, structured 3D models. Extensive evaluations on the ScanNet++ dataset demonstrate that TopoGS achieves state-of-the-art performance, providing a highly robust solution for generating accurate, topologically sound, and visually faithful scene representations.
While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized 3D reconstruction, it suffers from significant overhead due to massive redundant primitives. Existing compression methods typically rely on local sampling or fixed pruning thresholds, which often struggle to balance redundancy reduction with high-fidelity rendering. To address this, we propose a novel framework that formulates Gaussian optimization as a global geometric distribution matching problem. Specifically, our approach integrates three components: (1) we introduce a multi-view 3D Gaussian contribution ranking mechanism that filters primitives using geometric consistency instead of local heuristics; (2) we propose a global Optimal Transport (OT)-based aggregation algorithm that merges redundant primitives while preserving the underlying geometry; and (3) we design an OT-based densification operator that maintains the Gaussian's distributional properties for stable optimization. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality with only \textbf{10%} primitives and \textbf{10×} accelerated training speeds compared to vanilla 3DGS.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently enabled real-time novel view synthesis with impressive quality. However, it struggles to recover accurate surfaces under limited viewpoints and due to the inherent irregularity of Gaussian primitives. The resulting geometric errors are notoriously difficult to correct manually. To address these issues, we propose Gaussian Sculpting, a fully differentiable end-to-end framework for high-quality surface reconstruction. Our key insight is to anchor Gaussians onto an evolving differentiable surface, allowing them to guide signed distance field (SDF) optimization instead of extracting the surface only during post-processing. To enable stable gradient isolation during joint optimization, we design a bi-level training strategy in which the outer loop optimizes the geometry represented by the SDF, while the inner loop updates the Gaussians with the geometry fixed. We further impose constraints on Gaussian parameters to ensure consistency with the underlying surface, thereby improving both geometric and appearance fidelity during optimization. In addition, we introduce a multi-resolution subdivision scheme based on octree-like partitioning to preserve fine details while reducing memory consumption. Experiments on object-level scenes demonstrate that our method effectively removes redundant surfaces, recovers missing structures caused by limited viewpoints, and achieves strong reconstruction quality even at relatively low resolutions.