---
title: "2D Gaussian Splatting"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "2D Gaussian Splatting"
aliases: ["2DGS"]
first_seen: "2026-10-28T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Gaussian splatting","novel view synthesis","3D surface reconstruction","Hexels","SIGGRAPH / ACM Transactions on Graphics"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


A radiance-field rendering method that represents a 3D scene as a collection of oriented, elliptical 2D Gaussian "surfels" rather than the 3D Gaussian blobs of the original Gaussian Splatting, trading a small amount of rendering flexibility for materially better surface-reconstruction accuracy while keeping fast, differentiable rasterization. Introduced by Binbin Huang, Zehao Yu, Anpei Chen, Andreas Geiger & Shenghua Gao (arXiv:2403.17888), published as part of ACM Transactions on Graphics / SIGGRAPH 2024 — [[claim-hexels-2dgs-triangle-splatting-baselines-peer-reviewed-hexels-is-not|peer-reviewed, per the paper's own related-DOI record]].

Matters to this vault as the primary baseline every promoted Hexels claim-note measures against: Hexels is pitched as a drop-in replacement for 2DGS's Gaussian weighting function, and its headline PSNR and Chamfer-distance gains are reported relative to 2DGS at matched memory budgets — while its headline F1 gain on Tanks and Temples is reported against *unconstrained* 2DGS, the baseline at its best setting rather than at a matched budget.

## Updates
- 2026-10-30 — propagation-repair. The scoping of the headline Hexels-vs-2DGS
  gains was split. Was: "its headline PSNR, Chamfer-distance, and F1 gains are
  all reported relative to 2DGS at matched memory budgets". Now: PSNR and
  Chamfer-distance are the memory-matched comparisons, but the headline F1 gain
  (Hexels 34.38% vs 31.72%, Tanks and Temples) is against *unconstrained* 2DGS
  — memory-matched 2DGS scores 22.05% in the same Table 6. Propagates the
  2026-10-30 cross-model correction to
  [[claim-hexels-surface-reconstruction-chamfer-distance-and-f1-gains-over-2dgs]].

## References
- [[claim-hexels-replace-gaussian-kernel-with-hexagonal-support-and-linear-color-field-in-2dgs]]
- [[claim-hexels-matched-memory-budget-psnr-gains-over-2dgs-and-triangle-splatting]]
- [[claim-hexels-surface-reconstruction-chamfer-distance-and-f1-gains-over-2dgs]]
- [[claim-hexels-2dgs-triangle-splatting-baselines-peer-reviewed-hexels-is-not]]