LODGE: Level-of-Detail Large-Scale Gaussian Splatting with Efficient Rendering

Federico Tombari (Google, TUM) · Michael Niemeyer (Google) · Fabian Manhardt (Google) · Marie-Julie Rakotosaona (Google) · Christina Tsalicoglou (Google) · Jonas Kulhanek (Czech Technical University of Prague) · Torsten Sattler (CIIRC, Czech Technical University in Prague) · Songyou Peng (Google DeepMind)
3d gaussian splattingcamera distancedepth-aware smoothing filtergpu memory usagehierarchical representationimportance-based pruninglevel-of-detailmemory overheadopacity-blending mechanismoptimal subsetsreal-time renderingrendering timespatial chunksvisual artifactsvisual fidelity

In this work, we present a novel level-of-detail (LOD) method for 3D Gaussian Splatting that enables real-time rendering of large-scale scenes on memory-constrained devices. Our approach introduces a hierarchical LOD representation that iteratively selects optimal subsets of Gaussians based on camera distance, thus largely reducing both rendering time and GPU memory usage. We construct each LOD level by applying a depth-aware 3D smoothing filter, followed by importance-based pruning and fine-tuning to maintain visual fidelity. To further reduce memory overhead, we partition the scene into spatial chunks and dynamically load only relevant Gaussians during rendering, employing an opacity-blending mechanism to avoid visual artifacts at chunk boundaries. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both outdoor (Hierarchical 3DGS) and indoor (Zip-NeRF) datasets, delivering high-quality renderings with reduced latency and memory requirements.