Gaussian Splatting-based Volumetric Video Compression with Sparse 4D Anchors

Recent advances in 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) enable high-fidelity, real-time spatiotemporal rendering, but expose a fundamental trade-off between motion expressiveness and storage efficiency. While anchor-based designs achieve compactness through anchor-level parameter sharing, their rigid uniform parametrization enforces fixed Neural Gaussian counts and feature budgets per anchor. Consequently, insufficient fidelity is addressed by excessive anchor density, rather than lightweight, targeted increases in Neural Gaussian count or feature capacity, resulting in memory waste. To overcome this rigidity, we introduce an adaptive-capacity anchor-based framework that dynamically allocates the representational capacity based on local spatiotemporal demands. Adaptive Anchor Cardinality varies the number of Neural Gaussians per anchor, concentrating primitives in regions of high geometric or motion complexity while suppressing redundancy. In parallel, Adaptive Anchor Feature Masking modulates anchor-level feature channels, assigning rich features to complex regions and lightweight representations to simpler ones. Experiments on MPEG, Panoptic Sports, and N3DV datasets demonstrate substantial storage reduction without degrading visual quality. Notably, on challenging MPEG sequences with complex motion, our method achieves up to 1.5x higher compression than state-of-the-art anchor-based methods while preserving comparable quality.

Open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding is commonly achieved by embedding 2D vision-language features such as CLIP into a 3D Gaussian Splatting scene, turning it into a text-queryable semantic field. However, attaching a high-dimensional feature to each of millions of Gaussians inflates a single scene to gigabytes, which makes storage and deployment the real bottleneck of these fields. Existing compact methods each learn and ship a per-scene codec, an autoencoder, a quantized codebook, or a distilled feature field, entangling field construction with field storage and never compressing the per-Gaussian assignment that holds the bulk of the cost. We argue that construction and storage should be decoupled, and that storage is a rate-distortion problem over the per-Gaussian binding to a small anchor table, a structure no prior open-vocabulary method compresses. We present CoSAG, which constructs the field without any per-scene training through a closed-form transmittance-weighted lift, spatially grounded semantic anchors, and multi-view denoising, and stores it with a spatially predictive entropy coder that ships no decoder. Because the anchors are spatially grounded, the binding is predictable and therefore highly compressible. The transmittance-weighted lift and multi-view denoising yield a clean, view-consistent assignment, so the entropy coder spends almost no rate on correcting noise and instead codes only the residual against its spatial prediction. CoSAG reaches sub-megabyte storage while matching or exceeding the state of the art across the 2D-rendered, 3D-selection, and dense-LSeg protocols, reducing field size by 37 to 76x relative to LangSplatV2 at higher accuracy.

Volumetric video enables immersive free viewpoint rendering of dynamic real world scenes, yet existing methods struggle with long sequences and complex motions, often leading to temporal instability and visual artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose \ourname, a Gaussian splatting based framework for volumetric video reconstruction. Our key insight is that explicitly tracking long term complex motion with individual Gaussian primitives is inherently unstable. Instead, we organize Gaussians around time conditioned anchors that localize their spatial and temporal support, thereby reducing long range motion complexity. We further introduce a temporal windowing strategy to activate only anchors relevant to the queried time, which improves scalability and temporal coherence. In addition, to ensure spatial and temporal stability, we design a compact set of multi level anchor features that encode global features, local spatial features, and local temporal features, jointly constraining Gaussian generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \ourname \ consistently outperforms prior methods on long sequence volumetric videos with complex motions. Project page: https://github.com/WuJH2001/ATGS.