EVER: Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering for Real-time View Synthesis

We present Exact Volumetric Ellipsoid Rendering (EVER), a method for real-time 3D reconstruction.EVER accurately blends an unlimited number of overlapping primitives together in 3D space, eliminating the popping artifacts that 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and other related methods exhibit.EVER represents a radiance field as a set of constant-density volumetric ellipsoids, which are raytraced by intersecting each primitive twice (once upon ray entrance and another on ray exit) and accumulating the derivatives of the densities and colors along the ray.Because EVER is built around ray tracing, it also enables effects such as defocus blur and fish-eye camera distortion, while still achieving frame rates of ~30 FPS at 720p on an NVIDIA RTX4090. We show that our method is more accurate on the challenging large-scale scenes from the Zip-NeRF dataset, where it achieves state of the art SSIM, even higher than Zip-NeRF.