Neural Gabor Splatting: Enhanced Gaussian Splatting with Neural Gabor for High-frequency Surface Reconstruction

arXiv cs.CV / 4/20/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper proposes “neural Gabor splatting,” an extension of 3D Gaussian splatting that uses a small MLP per Gaussian primitive to represent complex color variations more efficiently.
  • It addresses a key limitation of standard 3DGS, where high-frequency surface details cause a rapid growth in the number of primitives because each primitive models only a single color.
  • The authors introduce a frequency-aware densification strategy to decide which primitives to prune or clone based on frequency energy, helping keep the primitive count under control.
  • Experiments on benchmarks such as Mip-NeRF360 and high-frequency datasets (e.g., checkerboard patterns) show improved reconstruction quality, supported by ablation studies.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the rapid emergence of 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) as a powerful approach for 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Its explicit representation with Gaussian primitives enables fast training, real-time rendering, and convenient post-processing such as editing and surface reconstruction. However, 3DGS suffers from a critical drawback: the number of primitives grows drastically for scenes with high-frequency appearance details, since each primitive can represent only a single color, requiring multiple primitives for every sharp color transition. To overcome this limitation, we propose neural Gabor splatting, which augments each Gaussian primitive with a lightweight multi-layer perceptron that models a wide range of color variations within a single primitive. To further control primitive numbers, we introduce a frequency-aware densification strategy that selects mismatch primitives for pruning and cloning based on frequency energy. Our method achieves accurate reconstruction of challenging high-frequency surfaces. We demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on both standard benchmarks, such as Mip-NeRF360 and High-Frequency datasets (e.g., checkered patterns), supported by comprehensive ablation studies.