CaliSplat: Sparse Gaussian Fitting and Calibrated Rate Allocation for Image Compression

Abstract

2D Gaussian representations provide an explicit and lightweight alternative for image representation, enabling fast deterministic decoding without a heavy neural synthesis network. However, existing per-image Gaussian codecs still require costly image-specific optimization to determine how limited Gaussian capacity should be distributed across heterogeneous regions. We introduce CaliSplat, an optimization-efficient Gaussian image codec that selectively explores candidate representations and globally allocates a constrained Gaussian budget. We exploit the closed-form reconstruction error of the single-Gaussian case as an inexpensive measure of local difficulty, fitting higher-capacity candidates only in regions where additional Gaussians are likely to be useful. To reduce selection errors caused by mismatched convergence rates across candidate sizes, a small set of longer-horizon fits is used to calibrate short-horizon distortion estimates before global budget-aware selection. The selected representation is then compressed into a bitstream. Across standard and large image datasets, CaliSplat achieves competitive or superior rate--distortion performance while reducing per-image fitting time by $3.0\times$--$15.7\times$ compared with representative Gaussian codecs. It further maintains high-throughput deterministic decoding at $175.9$--$478.2$~MP/s. These results demonstrate that content-adaptive Gaussian compression can substantially reduce per-image optimization cost while preserving strong reconstruction quality and efficient explicit decoding.