Neural Shell Texture Splatting: More Details and Fewer Primitives

Gaussian splatting techniques have shown promising results in novel view synthesis, achieving high fidelity and efficiency. However, their high reconstruction quality comes at the cost of requiring a large number of primitives. We identify this issue as stemming from the entanglement of geometry and appearance in Gaussian Splatting. To address this, we introduce a neural shell texture, a global representation that encodes texture information around the surface. We use Gaussian primitives as both a geometric representation and texture field samplers, efficiently splatting texture features into image space. Our evaluation demonstrates that this disentanglement enables high parameter efficiency, fine texture detail reconstruction, and easy textured mesh extraction, all while using significantly fewer primitives.