Gaussian entropy fields: Driving adaptive sparsity in 3D Gaussian optimization

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a leading technique for novel view synthesis, demonstrating exceptional rendering efficiency. Well-reconstructed surfaces can be characterized by low configurational entropy, where dominant primitives clearly define surface geometry while redundant components are suppressed. Three complementary technical contributions are introduced: (1) entropy-driven surface modeling via entropy minimization for low configurational entropy in primitive distributions; (2) adaptive spatial regularization using the Surface Neighborhood Redundancy Index (SNRI) and image entropy-guided weighting; (3) multi-scale geometric preservation through competitive cross-scale entropy alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GEF achieves competitive geometric precision on DTU and T&T benchmarks, while delivering superior rendering quality compared to existing methods on Mip-NeRF 360. Notably, superior Chamfer Distance (0.64) on DTU and F1 score (0.44) on T&T are obtained, alongside the best SSIM (0.855) and LPIPS (0.136) among baselines on Mip-NeRF 360, validating the framework’s ability to enhance surface reconstruction accuracy without compromising photometric fidelity.