3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as a state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction and rendering technique due to its high-quality results and fast training and rendering time. However, pixels covered by the same Gaussian are always shaded in the same color up to a Gaussian falloff scaling factor. Furthermore, the finest geometric detail any individual Gaussian can represent is a simple ellipsoid. These properties of 3DGS greatly limit the expressivity of individual Gaussian primitives. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from texture and alpha mapping in traditional graphics and integrate it with 3DGS. Specifically, we propose a new generalized Gaussian appearance representation that augments each Gaussian with alpha~(A), RGB, or RGBA texture maps to model spatially varying color and opacity across the extent of each Gaussian. As such, each Gaussian can represent a richer set of texture patterns and geometric structures, instead of just a single color and ellipsoid as in naive Gaussian Splatting. Surprisingly, we found that the expressivity of Gaussians can be greatly improved by using alpha-only texture maps, and further augmenting Gaussians with RGB texture maps achieves the highest expressivity. We validate our method on a wide variety of standard benchmark datasets and our own custom captures at both the object and scene levels. We demonstrate image quality improvements over existing methods while using a similar or lower number of Gaussians.
3D 高斯投影（3D Gaussian Splatting, 3DGS）因其高质量的结果以及快速的训练和渲染时间，近年来成为最先进的 3D 重建和渲染技术。然而，每个高斯覆盖的像素始终以相同的颜色着色，仅受到高斯衰减缩放因子的影响。此外，每个高斯能够表示的最精细几何细节仅限于简单的椭球体。这些特性极大地限制了单个高斯基元的表现能力。 为了解决这些问题，我们从传统图形学中的纹理和透明度映射中汲取灵感，将其与 3DGS 相结合。具体而言，我们提出了一种新的广义高斯外观表示方法，为每个高斯添加透明度（Alpha, A）、RGB 或 RGBA 纹理映射，从而能够在每个高斯范围内建模空间变化的颜色和不透明度。这使得每个高斯不仅可以表示单一颜色和椭球体，还能够表现更加丰富的纹理模式和几何结构。 令人惊讶的是，我们发现仅使用透明度纹理映射（alpha-only texture maps）即可显著提升高斯的表现力，而进一步为高斯增加 RGB 纹理映射可实现最高的表现力。我们在多种标准基准数据集以及自定义捕获的数据上对方法进行了验证，涵盖对象和场景级别的测试。实验结果表明，与现有方法相比，我们的方法在使用相似或更少数量高斯的情况下，显著提升了图像质量。