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

Victor Rong, Jingxiang Chen, Sherwin Bahmani, Kiriakos Kutulakos, David Lindell; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 3508-3518

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.