circle-group/hktex

Simone Foti* · Caner Korkmaz* · Stefanos Zafeiriou · Tolga Birdal * Equal contribution ECCV 2026 (Best Paper and Long Oral) [](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07557) [](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-37595-717) [](https://circle-group.github.io/research/HeatKernelTextures/) Heat Kernel Textures (HKTex) are an intrinsic texture representation for triangular meshes. Instead of relying on a UV atlas, HKTex represents appearance with anisotropic heat kernels—the geodesic counterparts of Gaussians—defined directly on the surface. Kernel positions, optimisation, pruning, and densification all operate on the mesh. HKTex avoids UV seams, distortion, wasted atlas space, duplicated vertices, and uneven texel resolution. The representation can be fitted from an existing texture or from multi-view images and integrates with physically based rendering. The environments below target Python 3.11, Linux, and an NVIDIA GPU with a CUDA 12.9-compatible driver. Mamba is recommended for environment management. To create the environment, open a terminal and run the the following commands to install the necessary dependencies: This optional environment includes the tiny-cuda-nn dependency used…