Depth Peeling for High-Fidelity Gaussian-Enhanced Surfel Rendering

Novel view synthesis has been significantly advanced by NeRFs and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), which require ordering volumetric samples or primitives for correct color blending. While the recent Gaussian-Enhanced Surfels (GES) enable high-performance, sort-free rendering, they suffer from aliasing artifacts and suboptimal reconstruction. To address these limitations, we propose DP-GES, a novel representation that combines 2D opaque surfels with semi-transparent boundaries to represent coarse-scale geometry and appearance, and 3D Gaussians surrounding the surfels to supplement fine-scale details. We employ Depth Peeling to achieve accurate per-pixel ordering for surfel rendering, which enables sort-free Gaussian splatting with correct transmittance modulation, effectively eliminating aliasing and popping artifacts while facilitating a fully differentiable joint optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior novel view synthesis quality and compares favorably against state-ofthe-art techniques across a wide range of scenes.