cs.CVJul 17, 2026

E3DGS: Unified Geometric-Photometric Equivariance for 3D Gaussian Splatting via Color-as-Geometry Embedding

Authors: Chankyo Kim, Maani Ghaffari

Organizations: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Abstract

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) captures scenes by coupling explicit geometry (position, covariance) with view-dependent photometry (Spherical Harmonics). However, building SE(3)\mathrm{SE}(3)-equivariant architectures on these primitives presents a fundamental representation bottleneck. Color has been treated as a signal rather than a geometric entity, making it nontrivial to unify symmetry across geometry and appearance as the camera frame changes. While translations are handled by relative coordinates, rotations act heterogeneously across attributes: μ↦Rμμ\mapsto Rμ, Σ↦RΣR⊤Σ\mapsto RΣR^\top, and fℓ↦Dℓ(R)fℓf_\ell\mapsto D^\ell(R)f_\ell. This mismatch complicates strict equivariance, leading existing methods to either discard or flatten SH coefficients, thereby breaking symmetry. We propose a unified solution rooted in representation theory: for SH degrees ℓ≤2\ell\le2, photometry is algebraically isomorphic to a rank-2 geometric tensor. We prove that the Wigner-DD action on these SH coefficients can be exactly reformulated as the conjugation action on 3×33\times3 matrices. Leveraging this, we introduce the Unified Matrix Embedding, a lifting that maps all Gaussian attributes into a unified carrier space, gl(3)\mathfrak{gl}(3). Building on the "Color-as-Geometry" formulation, we present E3DGS, a rigid-body (SE(3)\mathrm{SE}(3)) equivariant architecture that processes 3D Gaussians without Clebsch-Gordan tensor products. Evaluations on object vision and action-conditioned Gaussian world modeling demonstrate that our unified approach yields strong robustness under camera-frame changes and improved data efficiency.

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