A Compact Explicit 4D Representation for Dynamic Scenes

Abstract

A compact dynamic-scene representation must retain both the surfaces seen over time and the appearance needed to render them from new viewpoints. We present Sparc4D, a feed-forward autoencoder that encodes a monocular video with known cameras into a sparse 4D scene state. Static features are shared across the clip, while spatially anchored temporal slots compress time-varying features. A sparse decoder produces 2D Gaussian surfels, while stored source pixels preserve fine texture through geometric re-projection. The state includes one full source frame and dynamic-region pixels sampled every fourth frame, alongside learned features and sparse occupancy. For a 32-frame MultiCamVideo clip, it averages 0.95M 32-bit-equivalent values on random windows and 0.92M on the first-32 protocol. On first-32, Sparc4D reaches 21.70\,dB, compared with 20.40\,dB for MoVieS. On randomly placed windows, their PSNR scores are comparable. With stored texture disabled, temporal slots compress the time-varying feature state by a median $4.0\times$ and reduce the mean state from 1.04M to 0.42M values, with essentially unchanged target-view reconstruction quality. Without fine-tuning on real data, Sparc4D transfers to DyCheck and Neu3D, where stored texture improves LPIPS while slightly reducing PSNR.