RayGaussX: Accelerating Gaussian-Based Ray Marching for Real-Time and High-Quality Novel View Synthesis

RayGauss has recently achieved state-of-the-art results on synthetic and indoor scenes, representing radiance and density fields with irregularly distributed elliptical basis functions rendered via volume ray casting using a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH). However, its computational cost prevents real-time rendering on real-world scenes. Our approach, RayGaussX, builds on RayGauss by introducing key contributions that significantly accelerate both training and inference. Specifically, we incorporate volumetric rendering acceleration strategies such as empty-space skipping and adaptive sampling, enhance ray coherence, and introduce scale regularization to reduce false-positive intersections. Additionally, we propose a new densification criterion that improves density distribution in distant regions, leading to enhanced graphical quality on larger scenes. As a result, RayGaussX achieves 5× to 12× faster training and 50× to 80× higher rendering speeds (FPS) on real-world datasets while improving visual quality by up to +0.56 dB in PSNR. The code will soon be publicly available on GitHub.