Counting Contributions, Not Views: Occlusion-Aware Densification for 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

3D Gaussian Splatting grows a dense scene from a sparse initialization through adaptive density control (ADC), driven by per-Gaussian statistics gathered during rendering. These statistics pass a frustum-based visibility filter blind to occlusion: fully occluded Gaussians still count as observed, diluting the averaged gradient signal and suppressing densification precisely where geometry is occluded. We correct this with an occlusion-aware filter that restricts densification statistics to views in which a Gaussian actually contributes, and replace the criterion's raw view-count normalizer with an average-contribution one. Integrated into a StopThePop-based framework, the two together improve every image-quality metric over the occlusion-blind baseline on occlusion-heavy scenes (up to 6% lower LPIPS), at less than half the Gaussians a view-count normalizer requires. Under the longer schedules these large scenes require, the count stays bounded where most criteria diverge, and on smaller benchmarks our method stays competitive at a fraction of the competitors' count.