Recent advances in view synthesis and real-time rendering have achieved photorealistic quality at impressive ren-dering speeds. While radiance field-based methods achieve state-of-the-art quality in challenging scenarios such as in-the-wild captures and large-scale scenes, they often suf-fer from excessively high compute requirements linked to volumetric rendering. Gaussian Splatting-based methods, on the other hand, rely on rasterization and naturally achieve real-time rendering but suffer from brittle opti-mization heuristics that underperform on more challenging scenes. In this work, we present RadSplat, a lightweight method for robust real-time rendering of complex scenes. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we use radi-ance fields as a prior and supervision signal for optimizing point-based scene representations, leading to improved quality and more robust optimization. Next, we develop a novel pruning technique reducing the overall point count while maintaining high quality, leading to smaller and more compact scene representations with faster inference speeds. Finally, we propose a novel test-time filtering approach that further accelerates rendering and allows to scale to larger, house-sized scenes. We find that our method enables state-of-the-art synthesis of complex captures at 900+ FPS.

Single image 3D photography enables viewers to view a still image from novel viewpoints. Recent approaches combine monocular depth networks with inpainting networks to achieve compelling results. A drawback of these techniques is the use of hard depth layering, making them unable to model intricate appearance details such as thin hair-like structures. We present SLIDE, a modular and unified system for single image 3D photography that uses a simple yet effective soft layering strategy to better preserve appearance details in novel views. In addition, we propose a novel depth-aware training strategy for our inpainting module, better suited for the 3D photography task. The resulting SLIDE approach is modular, enabling the use of other components such as segmentation and matting for improved layering. At the same time, SLIDE uses an efficient layered depth formulation that only requires a single forward pass through the component networks to produce high quality 3D photos. Extensive experimental analysis on three view-synthesis datasets, in combination with user studies on in-the-wild image collections, demonstrate superior performance of our technique in comparison to existing strong baselines while being conceptually much simpler. Project page: https://varunjampani.github.io/slide