GeoSplat: A Deep Dive into Geometry-Constrained Gaussian Splatting

A few recent works explored incorporating geometric priors to regularize the optimization of Gaussian splatting, further improving its performance. However, those early studies mainly focused on the use of low-order geometric priors (e.g., normal vector), and they are also unreliably estimated by noise-sensitive methods, like local principal component analysis. To address their limitations, we first present GeoSplat, a general geometry-constrained optimization framework that exploits both first-order and second-order geometric quantities to improve the entire training pipeline of Gaussian splatting, including Gaussian initialization, gradient update, and densification. As an example, we initialize the scales of 3D Gaussian primitives in terms of principal curvatures, leading to a better coverage of the object surface than random initialization. Secondly, based on certain geometric structures (e.g., local manifold), we introduce efficient and noise-robust estimation methods that provide dynamic geometric priors for our framework. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets for novel view synthesis, showing that our framework: GeoSplat, significantly improves the performance of Gaussian splatting and outperforms previous baselines.