ImprovedVBGS: Real-time Continual Variational Bayes Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

On-the-fly reconstruction is a key requirement for many applications in robotics and autonomous navigation. Variational Bayes Gaussian Splatting (VBGS) enables continual learning without replay buffers using Coordinate Ascent Variational Inference (CAVI), but its per-frame iterations over all observed points make it too slow for real-time use with strict memory and latency requirements. We present ImprovedVBGS, an accelerated framework for on-the-fly continual reconstruction. This is achieved primarily through (i) spatially truncated variational inference, and (ii) improved reassignment that uses forwarding, truncation and eliminates wasteful dynamic recompilation. On the NeRF synthetic dataset, we reduce mean per-frame latency from ~84.0 s to ~0.050 s on an RTX 3070 Ti, a 1680x speed-up while maintaining reconstruction quality. We also improve novel-view synthesis quality using an exact renderer with no added training costs.