Fix False Transparency by Noise Guided Splatting
Abstract
Opaque objects reconstructed by 3DGS often exhibit a falsely transparent surface, leading to inconsistent background and internal patterns under camera motion in interactive viewing. This issue stems from the ill-posed optimization in 3DGS. During training, background and foreground Gaussians are blended via alpha-compositing and optimized solely against the input RGB images using a photometric loss. As this process lacks an explicit constraint on surface opacity, the optimization may incorrectly assign transparency to opaque regions, resulting in view-inconsistent and falsely transparent. This issue is difficult to detect in standard evaluation settings but becomes particularly evident in object-centric reconstructions under interactive viewing. Although other causes of view-inconsistency have been explored recently, false transparency has not been explicitly identified. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to identify, characterize, and develop solutions for this artifact, an underreported artifact in 3DGS. Our strategy, NGS, encourages surface Gaussians to adopt higher opacity by injecting opaque noise Gaussians in the object volume during training, requiring only minimal modifications to the existing splatting process. To quantitatively evaluate false transparency in static renderings, we propose a transmittance-based metric that measures the severity of this artifact. In addition, we introduce a customized, high-quality object-centric scan dataset exhibiting pronounced transparency issues, and we augment popular existing datasets with complementary infill noise specifically designed to assess the robustness of 3D reconstruction methods to false transparency. Experiments across multiple datasets show that NGS substantially reduces false transparency while maintaining competitive performance on standard rendering metrics, demonstrating its overall effectiveness.