FAST-Splat: Fast, Ambiguity-Free Semantics Transfer in Gaussian Splatting

We present FAST-Splat for fast, ambiguity-free semantic Gaussian Splatting, which seeks to address the main limitations of existing semantic Gaussian Splatting methods, namely: slow training and rendering speeds; high memory usage; and ambiguous semantic object localization. In deriving FAST-Splat , we formulate open-vocabulary semantic Gaussian Splatting as the problem of extending closed-set semantic distillation to the open-set (open-vocabulary) setting, enabling FAST-Splat to provide precise semantic object localization results, even when prompted with ambiguous user-provided natural-language queries. Further, by exploiting the explicit form of the Gaussian Splatting scene representation to the fullest extent, FAST-Splat retains the remarkable training and rendering speeds of Gaussian Splatting. Specifically, while existing semantic Gaussian Splatting methods distill semantics into a separate neural field or utilize neural models for dimensionality reduction, FAST-Splat directly augments each Gaussian with specific semantic codes, preserving the training, rendering, and memory-usage advantages of Gaussian Splatting over neural field methods. These Gaussian-specific semantic codes, together with a hash-table, enable semantic similarity to be measured with open-vocabulary user prompts and further enable FAST-Splat to respond with unambiguous semantic object labels and 3D masks, unlike prior methods. In experiments, we demonstrate that FAST-Splat is 4x to 6x faster to train with a 13x faster data pre-processing step, achieves between 18x to 75x faster rendering speeds, and requires about 3x smaller GPU memory, compared to the best-competing semantic Gaussian Splatting methods. Further, FAST-Splat achieves relatively similar or better semantic segmentation performance compared to existing methods. After the review period, we will provide links to the project website and the codebase.