Stochastic Ray Tracing for the Reconstruction of 3D Gaussian Splatting

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xu, Peiyu, Sun, Xin, Mullia, Krishna, Fei, Raymond, Georgiev, Iliyan, Zhao, Shuang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Xu, Peiyu
Sun, Xin
Mullia, Krishna
Fei, Raymond
Georgiev, Iliyan
Zhao, Shuang
author_facet Xu, Peiyu
Sun, Xin
Mullia, Krishna
Fei, Raymond
Georgiev, Iliyan
Zhao, Shuang
contents Ray-tracing-based 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) methods overcome the limitations of rasterization -- rigid pinhole camera assumptions, inaccurate shadows, and lack of native reflection or refraction -- but remain slower due to the cost of sorting all intersecting Gaussians along every ray. Moreover, existing ray-tracing methods still rely on rasterization-style approximations such as shadow mapping for relightable scenes, undermining the generality that ray tracing promises. We present a differentiable, sorting-free stochastic formulation for ray-traced 3DGS -- the first framework that uses stochastic ray tracing to both reconstruct and render standard and relightable 3DGS scenes. At its core is an unbiased Monte Carlo estimator for pixel-color gradients that evaluates only a small sampled subset of Gaussians per ray, bypassing the need for sorting. For standard 3DGS, our method matches the reconstruction quality and speed of rasterization-based 3DGS while substantially outperforming sorting-based ray tracing. For relightable 3DGS, the same stochastic estimator drives per-Gaussian shading with fully ray-traced shadow rays, delivering notably higher reconstruction fidelity than prior work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_23637
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stochastic Ray Tracing for the Reconstruction of 3D Gaussian Splatting
Xu, Peiyu
Sun, Xin
Mullia, Krishna
Fei, Raymond
Georgiev, Iliyan
Zhao, Shuang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Ray-tracing-based 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) methods overcome the limitations of rasterization -- rigid pinhole camera assumptions, inaccurate shadows, and lack of native reflection or refraction -- but remain slower due to the cost of sorting all intersecting Gaussians along every ray. Moreover, existing ray-tracing methods still rely on rasterization-style approximations such as shadow mapping for relightable scenes, undermining the generality that ray tracing promises. We present a differentiable, sorting-free stochastic formulation for ray-traced 3DGS -- the first framework that uses stochastic ray tracing to both reconstruct and render standard and relightable 3DGS scenes. At its core is an unbiased Monte Carlo estimator for pixel-color gradients that evaluates only a small sampled subset of Gaussians per ray, bypassing the need for sorting. For standard 3DGS, our method matches the reconstruction quality and speed of rasterization-based 3DGS while substantially outperforming sorting-based ray tracing. For relightable 3DGS, the same stochastic estimator drives per-Gaussian shading with fully ray-traced shadow rays, delivering notably higher reconstruction fidelity than prior work.
title Stochastic Ray Tracing for the Reconstruction of 3D Gaussian Splatting
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.23637