Textured Gaussians for Enhanced 3D Scene Appearance Modeling

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction technique, offering high-quality results with fast training and rendering. However, its expressivity is limited as pixels covered by the same Gaussian share identical colors aside from a Gaussian falloff scaling factor, and individual Gaussians can only represent simple ellipsoids geometrically. To overcome these limitations, we integrate texture and alpha mapping from traditional graphics with 3DGS. Our approach augments each Gaussian with alpha, RGB, or RGBA texture maps to model spatially varying color and opacity across each Gaussian’s extent. This allows Gaussians to represent richer texture patterns and geometric structures beyond single-color ellipsoids. Notably, alpha-only texture maps significantly improve Gaussian expressivity, while further augmenting with RGB texture maps achieve maximum 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, and demonstrate image quality improvements over existing methods while using a similar or lower number of Gaussians.