Gaussian Billboards: Expressive 2D Gaussian Splatting with Textures

TL;DR

This paper introduces Gaussian Billboards, a novel 2D Gaussian splatting method that incorporates textures to enhance scene representation quality, combining the robustness of 2D Gaussian splatting with the expressiveness of textured billboards.

Contribution

It unifies 2D Gaussian splatting with textured billboards by adding spatially-varying color through per-splat textures, improving scene sharpness and quality.

Findings

Enhanced scene sharpness and quality in evaluations.

Combines robustness of 2DGS with expressive texture mapping.

Outperforms original 2DGS in qualitative and quantitative tests.

Abstract

Gaussian Splatting has recently emerged as the go-to representation for reconstructing and rendering 3D scenes. The transition from 3D to 2D Gaussian primitives has further improved multi-view consistency and surface reconstruction accuracy. In this work we highlight the similarity between 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) and billboards from traditional computer graphics. Both use flat semi-transparent 2D geometry that is positioned, oriented and scaled in 3D space. However 2DGS uses a solid color per splat and an opacity modulated by a Gaussian distribution, where billboards are more expressive, modulating the color with a uv-parameterized texture. We propose to unify these concepts by presenting Gaussian Billboards, a modification of 2DGS to add spatially-varying color achieved using per-splat texture interpolation. The result is a mixture of the two representations, which benefits from both the robust scene optimization power of 2DGS and the expressiveness of texture mapping. We show that our method can improve the sharpness and quality of the scene representation in a wide range of qualitative and quantitative evaluations compared to the original 2DGS implementation.