The field of computer graphics was revolutionized by models such as NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting, displacing triangles as the dominant representation for photogrammetry. In this paper, we argue for a triangle comeback. We develop a differentiable renderer that directly optimizes triangles via end-to-end gradients. We achieve this by rendering each triangle as differentiable splats, combining the efficiency of triangles with the adaptive density of representations based on independent primitives. Compared to popular 2D and 3D Gaussian Splatting methods, our approach achieves competitive rendering and convergence speed, and demonstrates high visual quality. On the Mip-NeRF360 dataset, our method outperforms concurrent nonvolumetric primitives in visual fidelity and achieves higher perceptual quality than the state-of-the-art Zip-NeRF on indoor scenes. Triangles are simple, compatible with standard graphics stacks and GPU hardware, and highly efficient. Our results highlight the efficiency and effectiveness of triangle-based representations for high-quality novel view synthesis. Triangles bring us closer to mesh-based optimization by combining classical computer graphics with modern differentiable rendering frameworks. The project page is https://trianglesplatting.github.io/

Recent advances in radiance field reconstruction, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have achieved high-quality novel view synthesis and fast rendering by representing scenes with compositions of Gaussian primitives. However, 3D Gaussians present several limitations for scene reconstruction. Accurately capturing hard edges is challenging without significantly increasing the number of Gaussians, creating a large memory footprint. Moreover, they struggle to represent flat surfaces, as they are diffused in space. Without hand-crafted regularizers, they tend to disperse irregularly around the actual surface. To circumvent these issues, we introduce a novel method, named 3D Convex Splatting (3DCS), which leverages 3D smooth convexes as primitives for modeling geometrically-meaningful radiance fields from multi-view images. Smooth convex shapes offer greater flexibility than Gaussians, allowing for a better representation of 3D scenes with hard edges and dense volumes using fewer primitives. Powered by our efficient CUDA-based rasterizer, 3DCS achieves superior performance over 3DGS on benchmarks such as MipNeRF360, Tanks and Temples, and Deep Blending. Specifically, our method attains an improvement of up to 0.81 in PSNR and 0.026 in LPIPS compared to 3DGS while maintaining high rendering speeds and reducing the number of required primitives. Our results highlight the potential of 3D Convex Splatting to become the new standard for high-quality scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. The project page is https://convexsplatting.github.io

The application of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology in soccer enables sports analytics by extracting audio commentaries to provide insights into game events and facilitate automatic game understanding. This paper presents SoccerNet-Echoes, an extension of the SoccerNet dataset with automatically generated transcriptions of soccer game broadcasts. Generated using the Whisper model and translated with Google Translate into English when needed, these transcriptions enhance video content with textual information derived from game audio. SoccerNet-Echoes serves as a comprehensive resource for developing algorithms in action spotting, caption generation, and game summarization. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that combining modalities—audio, video, and text—yields mixed results on classification tasks. The combination of audio and video shows improved performance over individual modalities, while the addition of ASR text does not significantly enhance results. Additionally, our baseline summarization tasks indicate that ASR content enriches summaries, offering insights beyond event information. This multimodal dataset supports diverse applications, broadening the scope of research in sports analytics. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/SoccerNet/sn-echoes.