3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting represents a scene with many small, positioned and oriented Gaussian primitives whose color and opacity are combined by a differentiable renderer. Methods either optimize these primitives from posed multi-view images or predict them with feed-forward networks, often using depth, stereo, or pretrained vision-model features to improve sparse-view reconstruction. Work also extends the representation to changing scenes, avatars, semantic mapping, and applications such as SLAM, while developing pruning, compression, and faster rasterization for limited hardware. A central challenge is balancing convincing novel views and real-time rendering against accurate, stable geometry, especially when views are sparse, cameras are uncertain, or objects move.