BillBoard Splatting (BBSplat): Learnable Textured Primitives for Novel View Synthesis

TL;DR

BBSplat introduces learnable textured planar primitives for novel view synthesis, achieving high-quality rendering, efficient compression, and compatibility with existing Gaussian Splatting pipelines.

Contribution

It proposes textured planar primitives with learnable textures, bridging the quality gap in Gaussian Splatting and enabling efficient compression and ray-tracing effects.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art PSNR of 29.72 on DTU dataset.

Reduces model storage space by up to 17 times.

Demonstrates effectiveness on indoor and outdoor scene datasets.

Abstract

We present billboard Splatting (BBSplat) - a novel approach for novel view synthesis based on textured geometric primitives. BBSplat represents the scene as a set of optimizable textured planar primitives with learnable RGB textures and alpha-maps to control their shape. BBSplat primitives can be used in any Gaussian Splatting pipeline as drop-in replacements for Gaussians. The proposed primitives close the rendering quality gap between 2D and 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS), enabling the accurate extraction of 3D mesh as in the 2DGS framework. Additionally, the explicit nature of planar primitives enables the use of the ray-tracing effects in rasterization. Our novel regularization term encourages textures to have a sparser structure, enabling an efficient compression that leads to a reduction in the storage space of the model up to x17 times compared to 3DGS. Our experiments show the efficiency of BBSplat on standard datasets of real indoor and outdoor scenes such as Tanks&Temples, DTU, and Mip-NeRF-360. Namely, we achieve a state-of-the-art PSNR of 29.72 for DTU at Full HD resolution.