Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated promising results in novel view synthesis, its performance degrades dramatically with sparse inputs and generates undesirable artifacts. As the number of training views decreases, the novel view synthesis task degrades to a highly under-determined problem such that existing methods suffer from the notorious overfitting issue.
Interestingly, we observe that models with fewer Gaussian primitives exhibit less overfitting under spare inputs. Inspired by this observation, we propose a Random Dropout Regularization (RDR) to exploit the advantages of low-complexity models to alleviate overfitting. In addition, to remedy the lack of high-frequency details for these models, an Edge-guided Splitting Strategy (ESS) is developed. With these two techniques, our method (termed DropoutGS) provides a simple yet effective plug-in approach to improve the generalization performance of existing 3DGS methods. Extensive experiments show that our DropoutGS produces state-of-the-art performance under sparse views on benchmark datasets including Blender, LLFF, and DTU.
In DropoutGS, a random dropout regularization is applied to alleviate the overfitting degradation, obtaining smooth and artifact-free coarse rendering. To remedy the high-frequency detail loss during optimization, we additionally employ an edge-guided splitting strategy for finer synthesis views.
Comarison with current SOTA baselines. Zoom in for better visualization.
