Heat kernel textures the geodesic Gaussians that do not splat
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Foti, Simone
Korkmaz, Caner
Zafeiriou, Stefanos
Birdal, Tolga
Type
Chapter
Abstract
3D Gaussian Splatting has recently revolutionised novel view synthesis as well as many other 3D vision methods and applications. Drawing inspiration from this representation, we now rethink textures to overcome the main issues of UV mapping while considerably lowering their memory footprint. Heat Kernel Textures (HKTex) eliminate UV unwrapping as well as their persistent issues of wasted UV space, seams, distortions, vertex-duplication, and varying resolution. Grounded in discrete Riemannian geometry and intrinsically defined on any manifold surface discretised as a triangular mesh, HKTex uses anisotropic heat kernels as geodesic equivalents to Gaussians. Like our kernels, also the optimisation of their position and the adaptive densification strategies were redefined to operate on the surface of the object to be textureised. Our novel representation is also fully integrated with a physically based renderer and can be optimised either from existing textures or multi-view images. Our project page and code are available at circle-group.github.io/research/HeatKernelTextures.
Date Issued
2026-09-10
Date Acceptance
2026-06-17
Citation
2026, 17026, pp.306-323
ISSN
0302-9743
Publisher
Springer
Start Page
306
End Page
323
Journal / Book Title
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume
17026
Copyright Statement
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026. This is the author’s accepted manuscript made available under a CC-BY licence in accordance with Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access policy (www.imperial.ac.uk/oa-policy)
License URL
Source
European Conference on Computer Vision
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2026-09-08
Finish Date
2026-09-12
Coverage Spatial
Malmö, Sweden
Date Publish Online
2026-09-10