# Geometry Gaussians: Decoupling Appearance and Geometry in Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05124 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05124/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything 3: Recovering the Visual Space from Any Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10647/) (2025)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [MoGe: Unlocking Accurate Monocular Geometry Estimation for Open-Domain Images with Optimal Training Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19115/) (2024)
- [DepthSplat: Connecting Gaussian Splatting and Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13862/) (2024)
- [PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06521/) (2024)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [GaussianShader: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Shading Functions for Reflective Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17977/) (2023)
- [GS-IR: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16473/) (2023)
- [SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05087/) (2024)
- [StableNormal: Reducing Diffusion Variance for Stable and Sharp Normal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16864/) (2024)
- [GSDF: 3DGS Meets SDF for Improved Rendering and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16964/) (2024)
- [3DGSR: Implicit Surface Reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00409/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting in Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12262/) (2024)
- [SplatLoc: 3D Gaussian Splatting-based Visual Localization for Augmented Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14067/) (2024)
- [Reflective Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19282/) (2024)
- [MILo: Mesh-In-the-Loop Gaussian Splatting for Detailed and Efficient Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24096/) (2025)
- [MVPGS: Excavating Multi-view Priors for Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Input Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14316/) (2024)
- [GausSurf: Geometry-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting for Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19454/) (2024)
- [MVG-Splatting: Multi-View Guided Gaussian Splatting with Adaptive Quantile-Based Geometric Consistency Densification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11840/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RDGSplat: Render-Dedicated Geometry for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.09173/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

After the success of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for novel view synthesis, many works have explored how to also use it for geometric surface representation. However, extracting accurate geometric information directly from 3DGS remains challenging and can often reduce the appearance rendering quality. In this work, we show that 3DGS in its default form is inheritedly unsuited to represent texture and geometry at the same time, by training with complete ground-truth texture and geometry information. We also propose a simple solution by applying a single additional geometry opacity parameter to each splat, together with an optional transparency-curated optimization pipeline. Our experiments, both with ground-truth and vision foundation model geometric input, show that this change leads to improved rendering and geometry performance on a wide variety of dataset, and especially complex scenes with transparent objects benefit significantly from our method.