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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08508 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08508/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05877/) (2017)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13681/) (2023)
- [MobileNeRF: Exploiting the Polygon Rasterization Pipeline for Efficient Neural Field Rendering on Mobile Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00277/) (2022)
- [Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04628/) (2022)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09591/) (2024)
- [Mini-Splatting: Representing Scenes with a Constrained Number of Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14166/) (2024)
- [COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07504/) (2023)
- [Gaussian-SLAM: Photo-realistic Dense SLAM with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10070/) (2023)
- [Tri-MipRF: Tri-Mip Representation for Efficient Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11335/) (2023)
- [Reducing the Memory Footprint of 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17074/) (2024)
- [Revising Densification in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06109/) (2024)
- [GART: Gaussian Articulated Template Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16099/) (2023)
- [RadSplat: Radiance Field-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Robust Real-Time Rendering with 900+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13806/) (2024)
- [StopThePop: Sorted Gaussian Splatting for View-Consistent Real-time Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00525/) (2024)
- [FreGS: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Frequency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06908/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Triangle Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19175/) (2025)
- [Textured Gaussians for Enhanced 3D Scene Appearance Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18625/) (2024)
- [Quadratic Gaussian Splatting: High Quality Surface Reconstruction with Second-order Geometric Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16392/) (2024)
- [Neural Shell Texture Splatting: More Details and Fewer Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20200/) (2025)
- [TexGS-VolVis: Expressive Scene Editing for Volume Visualization via Textured Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13586/) (2025)
- [Content-Aware Texturing for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02621/) (2025)
- [Nexels: Neurally-Textured Surfels for Real-Time Novel View Synthesis with Sparse Geometries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13796/) (2025)
- [DiffSoup: Direct Differentiable Rasterization of Triangle Soup for Extreme Radiance Field Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27151/) (2026)
- [TextureSplat: Per-Primitive Texture Mapping for Reflective Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13348/) (2025)
- [STRinGS: Selective Text Refinement in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07230/) (2025)
- [Neural Gabor Splatting: Enhanced Gaussian Splatting with Neural Gabor for High-frequency Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15941/) (2026)
- [Depth Peeling for High-Fidelity Gaussian-Enhanced Surfel Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25345/) (2026)
- [Frequency-Decomposed Avatar Representation for Varying Camera Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03593/) (2025)
- [GTAvatar: Bridging Gaussian Splatting and Texture Mapping for Relightable and Editable Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09162/) (2025)
- [NBAvatar: Neural Billboards Avatars with Realistic Hand-Face Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12063/) (2026)
- [UTrice: Unifying Primitives in Differentiable Ray Tracing and Rasterization via Triangles for Particle-Based 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04421/) (2025)
- [ASAP-Textured Gaussians: Enhancing Textured Gaussians with Adaptive Sampling and Anisotropic Parameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14039/) (2025)
- [A Step to Decouple Optimization in 3DGS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16736/) (2026)
- [Less Gaussians, Texture More: 4K Feed-Forward Textured Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25745/) (2026)
- [Bake It Till You Make It: Ultrafast Spatial Texture-Atlas Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13808/) (2026)
- [Deformable Triangle Splatting: Flexible Primitives for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22446/) (2026)
- [PointGT: Simultaneous Geometry and Texture Editing for Point-Based Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03341/) (2026)
- [LiteTex-GS: Fast and Lightweight Texturing for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23380/) (2026)
- [SCION: Scene Composition with Instanced Neural Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02322/) (2026)
- [MicroSDF: Microfacet-Driven Hybrid Neural SDFs for Mixed-Reflectance Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19681/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.