GStex: Per-Primitive Texturing of 2D Gaussian Splatting for Decoupled Appearance and Geometry Modeling

TL;DR

GStex introduces per-primitive texturing for 2D Gaussian splatting, enabling decoupled appearance modeling that improves visual quality, reduces primitive count, and allows scene re-texturing.

Contribution

It proposes a novel per-primitive texturing method for Gaussian splatting, decoupling appearance from geometry, and enhancing view synthesis and editing capabilities.

Findings

Improved visual quality over prior Gaussian splatting methods.

Enhanced view synthesis performance with fewer primitives.

Enabled scene appearance editing and re-texturing.

Abstract

Gaussian splatting has demonstrated excellent performance for view synthesis and scene reconstruction. The representation achieves photorealistic quality by optimizing the position, scale, color, and opacity of thousands to millions of 2D or 3D Gaussian primitives within a scene. However, since each Gaussian primitive encodes both appearance and geometry, these attributes are strongly coupled--thus, high-fidelity appearance modeling requires a large number of Gaussian primitives, even when the scene geometry is simple (e.g., for a textured planar surface). We propose to texture each 2D Gaussian primitive so that even a single Gaussian can be used to capture appearance details. By employing per-primitive texturing, our appearance representation is agnostic to the topology and complexity of the scene's geometry. We show that our approach, GStex, yields improved visual quality over prior work in texturing Gaussian splats. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our decoupling enables improved novel view synthesis performance compared to 2D Gaussian splatting when reducing the number of Gaussian primitives, and that GStex can be used for scene appearance editing and re-texturing.