# HUGS: Holistic Urban 3D Scene Understanding via Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12722 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12722/

## Key facts

- Cited by 142 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06706/) (2023)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10642/) (2023)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [Panoptic-DeepLab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04751/) (2019)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10379/) (2020)
- [UniSim: A Neural Closed-Loop Sensor Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01898/) (2023)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [Panoptic Neural Fields: A Semantic Object-Aware Neural Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04334/) (2022)
- [Learning Object-Compositional Neural Radiance Field for Editable Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01847/) (2021)
- [EmerNeRF: Emergent Spatial-Temporal Scene Decomposition via Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02077/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Multi-Scale Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10821/) (2020)
- [MARS: An Instance-aware, Modular and Realistic Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15058/) (2023)
- [Panoptic NeRF: 3D-to-2D Label Transfer for Panoptic Urban Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15224/) (2022)
- [StreetSurf: Extending Multi-view Implicit Surface Reconstruction to Street Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04988/) (2023)
- [NeSF: Neural Semantic Fields for Generalizable Semantic Segmentation of 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13260/) (2021)
- [Category Level Object Pose Estimation via Neural Analysis-by-Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08145/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 142)

- [OmniRe: Omni Urban Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16760/) (2024)
- [OpenGaussian: Towards Point-Level 3D Gaussian-based Open Vocabulary Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02058/) (2024)
- [DriveDreamer4D: World Models Are Effective Data Machines for 4D Driving Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13571/) (2024)
- [UniScene: Unified Occupancy-centric Driving Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05435/) (2024)
- [HUGSIM: A Real-Time, Photo-Realistic and Closed-Loop Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01718/) (2024)
- [ReconDreamer: Crafting World Models for Driving Scene Reconstruction via Online Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19548/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting: Survey, Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17418/) (2024)
- [SplatAD: Real-Time Lidar and Camera Rendering with 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16816/) (2024)
- [Wild-GS: Real-Time Novel View Synthesis from Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10373/) (2024)
- [STORM: Spatio-Temporal Reconstruction Model for Large-Scale Outdoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00602/) (2024)
- [FreeVS: Generative View Synthesis on Free Driving Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18079/) (2024)
- [3D Convex Splatting: Radiance Field Rendering with 3D Smooth Convexes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14974/) (2024)
- [Triangle Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19175/) (2025)
- [DeSiRe-GS: 4D Street Gaussians for Static-Dynamic Decomposition and Surface Reconstruction for Urban Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11921/) (2024)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussian Fields for Urban Areas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03175/) (2024)
- [4D LangSplat: 4D Language Gaussian Splatting via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10437/) (2025)
- [3D Vision-Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07577/) (2024)
- [FreeSim: Toward Free-viewpoint Camera Simulation in Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03566/) (2024)
- [Scenario Dreamer: Vectorized Latent Diffusion for Generating Driving Simulation Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22496/) (2025)
- [StarGen: A Spatiotemporal Autoregression Framework with Video Diffusion Model for Scalable and Controllable Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05763/) (2025)
- [CoDa-4DGS: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting with Context and Deformation Awareness for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06744/) (2025)
- [Embodied AI: From LLMs to World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20021/) (2025)
- [EVolSplat: Efficient Volume-based Gaussian Splatting for Urban View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20168/) (2025)
- [SplatFlow: Self-Supervised Dynamic Gaussian Splatting in Neural Motion Flow Field for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15482/) (2024)
- [ReferSplat: Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08252/) (2025)
- [Neural Radiance Field in Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13816/) (2024)
- [MTGS: Multi-Traversal Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12552/) (2025)
- [Describe Anything Anywhere At Any Moment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00565/) (2025)
- [AD-GS: Object-Aware B-Spline Gaussian Splatting for Self-Supervised Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12137/) (2025)
- [DC-Gaussian: Improving 3D Gaussian Splatting for Reflective Dash Cam Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17705/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Holistic understanding of urban scenes based on RGB images is a challenging yet important problem. It encompasses understanding both the geometry and appearance to enable novel view synthesis, parsing semantic labels, and tracking moving objects. Despite considerable progress, existing approaches often focus on specific aspects of this task and require additional inputs such as LiDAR scans or manually annotated 3D bounding boxes. In this paper, we introduce a novel pipeline that utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting for holistic urban scene understanding. Our main idea involves the joint optimization of geometry, appearance, semantics, and motion using a combination of static and dynamic 3D Gaussians, where moving object poses are regularized via physical constraints. Our approach offers the ability to render new viewpoints in real-time, yielding 2D and 3D semantic information with high accuracy, and reconstruct dynamic scenes, even in scenarios where 3D bounding box detection are highly noisy. Experimental results on KITTI, KITTI-360, and Virtual KITTI 2 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.