Reframing Gaussian Splatting Densification with Complexity-Density Consistency of Primitives

The essence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) training is to smartly allocate Gaussian primitives, expressing complex regions with more primitives and vice versa. Prior researches typically mark out under-reconstructed regions in a rendering-loss-driven manner. However, such a loss-driven strategy is often dominated by low-frequency regions, which leads to insufficient modeling of high-frequency details in texture-rich regions. As a result, it yields a suboptimal spatial allocation of Gaussian primitives. This inspires us to excavate the loss-agnostic visual prior in training views to identify complex regions that need more primitives to model. Based on this insight, we propose Complexity-Density Consistent Gaussian Splatting (CDC-GS), which allocates primitives based on the consistency between visual complexity of training views and the density of primitives. Specifically, primitives involved in rendering high visual complexity areas are categorized as modeling high complexity regions, where we leverage the high frequency wavelet components of training views to measure the visual complexity. And the density of a primitive is computed with the inverse of geometric mean of its distance to the neighboring primitives. Guided by the positive correlation between primitive complexity and density, we determine primitives to be densified as well as pruned. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CDC-GS surpasses the baseline meth-ods in rendering quality by a large margin using the same amount of Gaussians. And we provide insightful analysis to reveal that our method serves perpendicularly to rendering loss in guiding Gaussian primitive allocation. Our implementations are available on our project page: