  We propose Differentiable Surface Splatting (DSS), a high-fidelity
differentiable renderer for point clouds. Gradients for point locations and
normals are carefully designed to handle discontinuities of the rendering
function. Regularization terms are introduced to ensure uniform distribution of
the points on the underlying surface. We demonstrate applications of DSS to
inverse rendering for geometry synthesis and denoising, where large scale
topological changes, as well as small scale detail modifications, are
accurately and robustly handled without requiring explicit connectivity,
outperforming state-of-the-art techniques. The data and code are at
https://github.com/yifita/DSS.
