SpeedyGS: Content-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression via Two-Stage Optimization

Abstract

Recent progress in compressing large-scale 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) data has substantially reduced storage footprint, network transmission bandwidth, and memory traffic to GPU caches before rendering. Yet decoding with advanced 3DGS codecs still takes seconds, making them unsuitable for interactive applications. To systematically address this challenge, we propose SpeedyGS, a Content-Aware 3DGS Compressor that separately optimizes the structural formation and statistical coding. First, in structural formation, we jointly optimize adaptive quantization and pruning under a unified rate-distortion objective, where the rate term is replaced by a lightweight rate proxy that estimates entropy coding cost of the next stage, thereby efficiently regulating Gaussian density and precision to yield a compact scene representation. Then, in the statistical coding phase, Gaussian geometry is converted into sparse octree tokens and subsequently undergoes multi-stage coding, while Gaussian attributes are serialized into a 1D token stream for entropy coding via a complexity-controllable local autoregressive model. SpeedyGS achieves a favorable balance among optimization efficiency, compression performance, decoding latency, and rendering speed. Compared to vanilla 3DGS, SpeedyGS achieves up to 160$\times$ model size reduction with negligible quality degradation across common datasets. Compared to state-of-the-art compression methods, it also offers significantly faster decoding and accelerates optimization by 9$\times$ on consumer-grade hardware. To further reduce decoding overhead, the statistical coding stage also supports channel-wise, fixed-length coding for Gaussian as a simpler alternative, enabling SpeedyGS to better adapt to the underlying application and reduce decoding latency to nearly zero.