# Gaussian Billboards: Expressive 2D Gaussian Splatting with Textures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12734 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12734/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [gsplat: An Open-Source Library for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06765/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Deformable Beta Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18630/) (2025)
- [Digital Twin Generation from Visual Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13159/) (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)
- [Neural Gabor Splatting: Enhanced Gaussian Splatting with Neural Gabor for High-frequency Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15941/) (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)
- [A2TG: Adaptive Anisotropic Textured Gaussians for Efficient 3D Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09243/) (2026)
- [NBAvatar: Neural Billboards Avatars with Realistic Hand-Face Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12063/) (2026)
- [Hybrid Latents: Geometry-Appearance-Aware Surfel Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14928/) (2026)
- [ASAP-Textured Gaussians: Enhancing Textured Gaussians with Adaptive Sampling and Anisotropic Parameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14039/) (2025)
- [Less Gaussians, Texture More: 4K Feed-Forward Textured Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25745/) (2026)
- [Resonant Brane Splatting for Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29453/) (2026)
- [Floating Radiance Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05920/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.