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

We present billboard Splatting (BBSplat) - a novel approach for 3D scene representation 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. Our method's qualitative and quantitative improvements over 3D and 2D Gaussians are most noticeable when fewer primitives are used, when BBSplat achieves over 1200 FPS. Our novel regularization term encourages textures to have a sparser structure, unlocking an efficient compression that leads to a reduction in storage space of the model.

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. We demonstrate improvements on PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS metrics compared to the state-of-the-art, especially for the case when fewer primitives are used, which, on the other hand, leads to up to 2 times inference speed improvement for the same rendering quality.

1. 3D Convex Splatting: Radiance Field Rendering with 3D Smooth Convexes
2. Texture-GS: Disentangling the Geometry and Texture for 3D Gaussian Splatting Editing
3. Textured Gaussians for Enhanced 3D Scene Appearance Modeling
4. SuperGaussians: Enhancing Gaussian Splatting Using Primitives with Spatially Varying Colors
5. HDGS: Textured 2D Gaussian Splatting for Enhanced Scene Rendering
6. GStex: Per-Primitive Texturing of 2D Gaussian Splatting for Decoupled Appearance and Geometry Modeling
7. Gaussian Billboards: Expressive 2D Gaussian Splatting with Textures