3D-GIMP: When 3D Gaussian Inpainting Meets PatchMatch

Xuening Tian, Dieter Schmalstieg, Shohei Mori

Recent advances in 3D scene editing have leveraged iterative diffusion models to update input views. However, this process is computationally expensive and struggles to produce sharp details. Meanwhile, ``hallucination drift'' frequently introduces multi-view inconsistencies, leading to structural artifacts when rendering novel viewpoints. To address this problem, we present 3D-GIMP (3D Gaussian Inpainting Meets Patch Matching), a novel hybrid paradigm designed for high-fidelity object removal in 3D Gaussian Splatting. Instead of diffusing every view, 3D-GIMP performs a single generative inpainting on a key reference view, which serves as an appearance prior. We then introduce a 3D-aware PatchMatch algorithm to propagate these reference textures across all remaining views via correspondence matching, effectively bypassing the stochastic nature of frame-by-frame diffusion. By prioritizing reconstructive consistency over iterative generation, 3D-GIMP maintains high-frequency details across arbitrary resolutions while ensuring a mathematically consistent 3D reconstruction. Our experiments demonstrate that 3D-GIMP not only achieves competitive inpainting quality as previous methods using diffusion in multiple views, but also outperforms these methods in rendering speed and view consistency.