StableGS: A Floater-Free Framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstructions are plagued by stubborn ``floater" artifacts that degrade their geometric and visual fidelity. We are the first to reveal the root cause: a fundamental conflict in the 3DGS optimization process where the opacity gradients of floaters vanish when their blended color reaches a pseudo-equilibrium of canceling errors against the background, trapping them in a spurious local minimum. To resolve this, we propose StableGS, a novel framework that decouples geometric regularization from final appearance rendering. Its core is a Dual Opacity architecture that creates two separate rendering paths: a ``Geometric Regularization Path" to bear strong depth-based constraints for structural correctness, and an ``Appearance Refinement Path" to generate high-fidelity details upon this stable foundation. We complement this with a synergistic set of geometric constraints: a self-supervised depth consistency loss and an external geometric prior enabled by our efficient global scale optimization algorithm. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show StableGS not only eliminates floaters but also resolves the common blur-artifact trade-off, achieving state-of-the-art geometric accuracy and visual quality.