ConeGS: Error-Guided Densification Using Pixel Cones for Improved Reconstruction with Fewer Primitives

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves state-of-the-art image quality and real-time performance in novel view synthesis but often suffers from a suboptimal spatial distribution of primitives. This issue stems from cloning-based densification, which propagates Gaussians along existing geometry, limiting exploration and requiring many primitives to adequately cover the scene. We present ConeGS, an image-space-informed densification framework that is independent of existing scene geometry state. ConeGS first creates a fast Instant Neural Graphics Primitives (iNGP) reconstruction as a geometric proxy to estimate per-pixel depth. During the subsequent 3DGS optimization, it identifies high-error pixels and inserts new Gaussians along the corresponding viewing cones at the predicted depth values, initializing their size according to the cone diameter. A pre-activation opacity penalty rapidly removes redundant Gaussians, while a primitive budgeting strategy controls the total number of primitives, either by a fixed budget or by adapting to scene complexity, ensuring high reconstruction quality. Experiments show that ConeGS consistently enhances reconstruction quality and rendering performance across Gaussian budgets, with especially strong gains under tight primitive constraints where efficient placement is crucial.

Occlusion Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation with StridedPoseGraphFormer and Data Augmentation

Occlusion is an omnipresent challenge in 3D human pose estimation (HPE). In spite of the large amount of research dedicated to 3D HPE, only a limited number of studies address the problem of occlusion explicitly. To fill this gap, we propose to combine exploitation of spatio-temporal features with synthetic occlusion augmentation during training to deal with occlusion. To this end, we build a spatio-temporal 3D HPE model, StridedPoseGraphFormer based on graph convolution and transformers, and train it using occlusion augmentation. Unlike the existing occlusion-aware methods, that are only tested for limited occlusion, we extensively evaluate our method for varying degrees of occlusion. We show that our proposed method compares favorably with the state-of-the-art (SoA). Our experimental results also reveal that in the absence of any occlusion handling mechanism, the performance of SoA 3D HPE methods degrades significantly when they encounter occlusion.