Spherical Bayesian Experimental Design for Active View Selection in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Active view selection for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) requires information-theoretic grounding, computational efficiency, and strong reconstruction quality, yet existing methods satisfy these only partially. Information-theoretic approaches quantify gain over the full parameter space via costly Fisher computation under a Laplace approximation; faster alternatives sacrifice the grounding they started from. We propose SpheriBED, a Bayesian experimental design framework that defines the information objective over per-Gaussian spherical appearance—the quantity each observation fundamentally measures—rather than the full parameter vector, yielding exact closed-form posteriors without Laplace approximation. Scoring a candidate view requires only a single forward rasterization pass with no backward pass or per-candidate optimization. Extensive experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that SpheriBED consistently improves active reconstruction performance and provides more reliable uncertainty quantification compared to state-of-the-art methods.