Gaussian Splatting for Dummies
Gaussian Splatting is a 3D scene reconstruction technique that represents scenes as collections of colored, oriented ellipsoids called splats. Each splat has attributes like position, scale, rotation, color, and opacity, with color information encoded using spherical harmonics for view-dependent appearance. The rendering process involves transforming these 3D Gaussians into 2D images through a forward rasterization pipeline that projects splats onto the camera's image plane.
- ▪Gaussian Splatting uses oriented 3D ellipsoids with color and opacity to reconstruct scenes.
- ▪Each splat's color is encoded using spherical harmonics up to band 3, allowing for view-dependent appearance.
- ▪The forward rendering pass projects splats by computing a 3D covariance matrix, transforming it into view space, and rasterizing onto the 2D image plane.
- ▪Spherical harmonics coefficients are used because they compactly represent how surface color changes with viewing direction.
- ▪The covariance matrix is constructed from scale and rotation parameters to ensure it remains positive semi-definite during optimization.
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Gaussian Splatting for Dummies Apr 12, 2026 Gaussian Splatting is a fascinating scene reconstruction technique introduced by INRIA and last year I had a lot of fun tinkering with it while on my semex. I recently discovered some of my notes related to it and decided to digitize it this weekend, along the way I reimplemented the forward rasterization pass in rust and decided it would be fun to write a tutorial explaining gaussian splatting to everyone, so here it is what is a gaussian splat? a 3D Gaussian splat is an oriented ellipsoid in space that carries some color and opacity. you can think of it as a fuzzy colored blob.
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