4D Scaffold Gaussian Splatting for Memory Efficient Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Existing 4D Gaussian methods for dynamic scene reconstruction offer high visual fidelity and fast rendering. However, these methods suffer from excessive memory and storage demands, which limits their practical deployment. This paper proposes a 4D anchor-based framework that retains visual quality and rendering speed of 4D Gaussians while significantly reducing storage costs. Our method extends 3D scaffolding to 4D space, and leverages sparse 4D grid-aligned anchors with compressed feature vectors. Each anchor models a set of neural 4D Gaussians, each of which represent a local spatiotemporal region. In addition, we introduce a temporal coverage-aware anchor growing strategy to effectively assign additional anchors to under-reconstructed dynamic regions. Our method adjusts the accumulated gradients based on Gaussians' temporal coverage, improving reconstruction quality in dynamic regions. To reduce the number of anchors, we further present enhanced formulations of neural 4D Gaussians. These include the neural velocity, and the temporal opacity derived from a generalized Gaussian distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art visual quality and 97.8% storage reduction over 4DGS.