Papers › SplatAD: Real-Time Lidar and Camera Rendering with 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving

SplatAD: Real-Time Lidar and Camera Rendering with 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving

25 Nov 2024CVPR 2025 1arXiv:2411.16816archive 2025-07-28

Georg Hess, Carl Lindström, Maryam Fatemi, Christoffer Petersson, Lennart Svensson

Ensuring the safety of autonomous robots, such as self-driving vehicles, requires extensive testing across diverse driving scenarios. Simulation is a key ingredient for conducting such testing in a cost-effective and scalable way. Neural rendering methods have gained popularity, as they can build simulation environments from collected logs in a data-driven manner. However, existing neural radiance field (NeRF) methods for sensor-realistic rendering of camera and lidar data suffer from low rendering speeds, limiting their applicability for large-scale testing. While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering, current methods are limited to camera data and are unable to render lidar data essential for autonomous driving. To address these limitations, we propose SplatAD, the first 3DGS-based method for realistic, real-time rendering of dynamic scenes for both camera and lidar data. SplatAD accurately models key sensor-specific phenomena such as rolling shutter effects, lidar intensity, and lidar ray dropouts, using purpose-built algorithms to optimize rendering efficiency. Evaluation across three autonomous driving datasets demonstrates that SplatAD achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality with up to +2 PSNR for NVS and +3 PSNR for reconstruction while increasing rendering speed over NeRF-based methods by an order of magnitude. See https://research.zenseact.com/publications/splatad/ for our project page.

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carlinds/splatad officialmentioned on GitHubjax report
georghess/neurad mentioned on GitHubjaxApache-2.0 report
georghess/neurad-studio mentioned on GitHubjax report

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3ran · honoured contract
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lidar_rasterization carlinds/splatad/gsplat/rendering.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 80b72846d52b20e8 · report
rasterization_inria_wrapper carlinds/splatad/gsplat/rendering.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · c0d0933530936665 · report
RGB2SH georghess/neurad-studio/nerfstudio/models/splatad.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 3d2c1a432b1a3561 · report
SH2RGB georghess/neurad-studio/nerfstudio/models/splatad.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 508a98451f5b78fe · report
lossfun_outer georghess/neurad/nerfstudio/model_components/losses.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f1e7d68796e89ab2 · report
merge_methods georghess/neurad/nerfstudio/configs/method_configs.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · c64c9a3a66a1d0c8 · report
outer georghess/neurad/nerfstudio/model_components/losses.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · de818de3a5e2a784 · report
random_quat_tensor georghess/neurad-studio/nerfstudio/models/splatad.py community (archive-listed) ran · honoured contract fingerprinted Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 57acaa6d628ba9f8 · report
ray_samples_to_sdist georghess/neurad/nerfstudio/model_components/losses.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 34a1673bf755a59b · report
sort_methods georghess/neurad/nerfstudio/configs/method_configs.py community (archive-listed) ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 06036a2535dc9b18 · report

Tasks

3DGSAutonomous DrivingNeRFNeural Rendering

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