Efficient Decoupled Feature 3D Gaussian Splatting via Hierarchical Compression

Efficient 3D scene representation has become a key challenge with the rise of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), particularly when incorporating semantic information into the scene representation. Existing 3DGS-based methods embed both color and high-dimensional semantic features into a single field, leading to significant storage and computational overhead. To mitigate this, we propose Decoupled Feature 3D Gaussian Splatting (DF-3DGS), a novel method that decouples the color and semantic fields, thereby reducing the number of 3D Gaussians required for semantic representation. We then introduce a hierarchical compression strategy that first employs our novel quantization approach with dynamic codebook evolution to reduce data size, followed by a scene-specific autoencoder for further compression of the semantic feature dimensions. This multi-stage approach results in a compact representation that enhances both storage efficiency and reconstruction speed. Experimental results demonstrate that DF-3DGS outperforms previous 3DGS-based methods, achieving faster training and rendering times while requiring less storage, without sacrificing performance--in fact, it improves performance in the novel view semantic segmentation task. Specifically, DF-3DGS achieves remarkable improvements over Feature 3DGS, reducing training time by 10xand storage by 20x, while improving the mIoU of novel view semantic segmentation by 4%. The code will be publicly available.