Spectral-GS: Taming 3D Gaussian Splatting
with Spectral Entropy

SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 (Conference Track)


Letian Huang1      Jie Guo* 1      Jialin Dan1      Ruoyu Fu1      Yuanqi Li1      Yanwen Guo1     
* Corresponding author
State Key Lab for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University

Abstract

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved impressive results in novel view synthesis, demonstrating high fidelity and efficiency. However, it easily exhibits needle-like artifacts, especially when increasing the sampling rate. Mip-Splatting tries to remove these artifacts with a 3D smoothing filter for frequency constraints and a 2D Mip filter for approximated supersampling. Unfortunately, it tends to produce over-blurred results, and sometimes needle-like Gaussians still persist. Our spectral analysis of the covariance matrix during optimization and densification reveals that current 3DGS lacks shape awareness, relying instead on spectral radius and view positional gradients to determine splitting. As a result, needle-like Gaussians with small positional gradients and low spectral entropy fail to split and overfit high-frequency details. Furthermore, both the filters used in 3DGS and Mip-Splatting reduce the spectral entropy and increase the condition number during zooming in to synthesize novel view, causing view inconsistencies and more pronounced artifacts. Our Spectral-GS, based on spectral analysis, introduces 3D shape-aware splitting and 2D view-consistent filtering strategies, effectively addressing these issues, enhancing 3DGS's capability to represent high-frequency details without noticeable artifacts, and achieving high-quality realistic rendering.

Video

The images are ordered from left to right, corresponding to the transition from the training focal length to larger focal lengths (zoom in). These methods produce nearly identical novel view synthesis results at the training view’s focal length. However, when the focal length and sampling rate increase, 3DGS and Mip-Splatting suffer from severe needle-like artifacts, leading to a notable decline in rendering quality.

Method

Overview of Spectral-GS. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) [Kerbl et al. 2023] decides whether to split based on the positional gradients and the spectral radius of the covariance matrix without considering the shape of primitives. We propose the 3D shape-aware splitting strategy based on the spectral analysis (3D Split). In screen space, both the EWA filter [Zwicker et al. 2002] of 3DGS which attempts to cover an entire pixel, and the Mip filter of Mip-Splatting [Yu et al. 2024] which approximates supersampling, result in a reduction of spectral entropy when zooming in to synthesize novel view. Our view-consistent filter’s kernel is not constant to maintain the spectral entropy consistency (2D Filter).

Motivation

The condition number and spectral entropy can be used to measure the shape or degree of anisotropy of the Gaussian.
1. Loss-sensitivity and shape-unawareness in densification. 2. View-inconsistency in filtering.

Comparisons

Qualitative comparisons on the synthetic scenes and real scenes. Differences in quality highlighted by insets. We visualize the spectral entropy maps of 3D Gaussians. Bluer regions indicate lower spectral entropy, with more needle-like degraded Gaussians, while greener regions represent higher spectral entropy.

Real-Time Interactive Viewer

Click the image to use the real-time interactive viewer.

chair
chair 3DGS
chair Mip-Splatting
chair Analytic-Splatting

hotdog
hotdog 3DGS
hotdog Mip-Splatting
hotdog Analytic-Splatting

Visual Comparisons

Ours
3DGS [Kerbl et al. 2023]
Ours
Mip-Splatting [Yu et al. 2024]
Ours
Analytic-Splatting [Liang et al. 2024]
Ours
Ground-truth

Ours
3DGS [Kerbl et al. 2023]
Ours
Mip-Splatting [Yu et al. 2024]
Ours
Pixel-GS [Zhang et al. 2024]
Ours
Ground-truth
Ours
3DGS [Kerbl et al. 2023]
Ours
Mip-Splatting [Yu et al. 2024]
Ours
Analytic-Splatting [Liang et al. 2024]
Ours
Ground-truth

Ours
3DGS [Kerbl et al. 2023]
Ours
Mip-Splatting [Yu et al. 2024]
Ours
Pixel-GS [Zhang et al. 2024]
Ours
Ground-truth

BibTeX

@inproceedings{spectralgs,
    author = {Huang, Letian and Guo, Jie and Dan, Jialin and Fu, Ruoyu and Li, Yuanqi and Guo, Yanwen},
    title = {Spectral-GS: Taming 3D Gaussian Splatting with Spectral Entropy},
    year = {2025},
    isbn = {9798400721373},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3757377.3763907},
    doi = {10.1145/3757377.3763907},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Conference Papers},
    series = {SA Conference Papers '25}
}

Acknowledgments and Funding

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61972194 and No. 62032011) and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20211147).