Beyond Static Gaussians: An Empirical Investigation of Architectural Paradigms for Dynamic 3D Scene Reconstruction

Dynamic scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis are fundamental to next-generation visual intelligence applications such as virtual reality, robotics, and digital twins. However, high-fidelity reconstruction of complex, time-varying scenes from arbitrary viewpoints remains a significant challenge. Existing dynamic 3DGS methods suffer from computational inefficiency, since they model all Gaussians as dynamic components. While recent decomposition-based approaches address this issue, they still struggle with degraded reconstruction quality and prolonged training time. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel dynamic reconstruction framework built upon an efficient static-dynamic decomposition strategy using a Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting encoder and an optical flow model. By eliminating redundant computations on static regions, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing baselines across rendering quality, training and rendering speed, and storage efficiency. Notably, on the Neural 3D dataset, our framework requires only 10 minutes for training and achieves a rendering speed of over 700 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU at resolution of 1352x1014. Furthermore, our decomposition strategy eliminates the need for COLMAP preprocessing and enables deterministic initialization, thereby enhancing both efficiency and reproducibility.

Despite modeling temporal motion, dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods still inherit a static densification strategy that is ill-suited for dynamic scenes. This neglect of temporal behavior leads to under-reconstructed and blurry dynamic regions, as short-lived Gaussians receive sparse supervision and fail to densify effectively. We propose a Visibility-Aware Densification (VAD) framework that integrates temporal visibility into the densification process, ensuring that Gaussians are refined based on their actual temporal presence. A Temporally-Adaptive Thresholding (TAT) mechanism further adjusts each Gaussian's densification threshold according to its temporal lifespan, promoting balanced refinement of both static and dynamic regions. Finally, a Temporal Offset Warping (TOW) design enhances deformation capacity around temporal centers, extending the lifespan of highly dynamic Gaussians and facilitating more effective densification. Our approach achieves substantial improvements in the visual quality of dynamic regions, outperforming existing methods across three dynamic multi-view benchmark datasets. Moreover, the proposed VAD module generalizes across diverse dynamic 3DGS methods, consistently improving dynamic reconstruction as a plug-and-play component.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful explicit representation enabling real-time, high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, its practical use is hindered by the massive memory and computational demands required to store and render millions of Gaussians. These challenges become even more severe in 4D dynamic scenes. To address these issues, the field of Efficient Gaussian Splatting has rapidly evolved, proposing methods that reduce redundancy while preserving reconstruction quality. This survey provides the first unified overview of efficient 3D and 4D Gaussian Splatting techniques. For both 3D and 4D settings, we systematically categorize existing methods into two major directions, Parameter Compression and Restructuring Compression, and comprehensively summarize the core ideas and methodological trends within each category. We further cover widely used datasets, evaluation metrics, and representative benchmark comparisons. Finally, we discuss current limitations and outline promising research directions toward scalable, compact, and real-time Gaussian Splatting for both static and dynamic 3D scene representation.