Depth Peeling for High-Fidelity Gaussian-Enhanced Surfel Rendering

2026-05-24

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitations of Gaussian-Enhanced Surfels (GES) in order-free rendering, which often suffer from aliasing and insufficient reconstruction quality. The authors propose DP-GES, a novel surfel representation that introduces semi-transparent boundaries and leverages depth peeling to establish pixel-accurate ordering without explicit sorting. This approach enables high-fidelity Gaussian splatting while supporting correct transmission modulation and fully differentiable joint optimization—the first such capability within an order-free framework. By doing so, DP-GES effectively eliminates aliasing and flickering artifacts. Experimental results demonstrate that DP-GES significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods across diverse scenes, achieving markedly improved reconstruction fidelity.

Abstract

Novel view synthesis has been significantly advanced by NeRFs and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), which require ordering volumetric samples or primitives for correct color blending. While the recent Gaussian-Enhanced Surfels (GES) enable high-performance, sort-free rendering, they suffer from aliasing artifacts and suboptimal reconstruction. To address these limitations, we propose DP-GES, a novel representation that augments opaque surfels with semi-transparent boundaries and leverages Depth Peeling to establish accurate per-pixel ordering. This design enables sort-free Gaussian splatting with correct transmittance modulation, effectively eliminating aliasing and popping artifacts while facilitating a fully differentiable joint optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior reconstruction quality and compares favorably against state-of-the-art techniques across a wide range of scenes.

Problem

• aliasing artifacts
• reconstruction quality
• Gaussian-Enhanced Surfels
• novel view synthesis
• sort-free rendering

Innovation

• Depth Peeling
• Gaussian Splatting
• Surfel Rendering
• Sort-Free Rendering
• Differentiable Rendering