# SplatLoc: 3D Gaussian Splatting-based Visual Localization for Augmented Reality

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14067 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14067/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [iMAP: Implicit Mapping and Positioning in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12352/) (2021)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16084/) (2023)
- [INeRF: Inverting Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05877/) (2020)
- [Decomposing NeRF for Editing via Feature Field Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15585/) (2022)
- [SC-GS: Sparse-Controlled Gaussian Splatting for Editable Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14937/) (2023)
- [PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06521/) (2024)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [Compressed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Accelerated Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02436/) (2023)
- [A Hierarchical 3D Gaussian Representation for Real-Time Rendering of Very Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12080/) (2024)
- [VastGaussian: Vast 3D Gaussians for Large Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17427/) (2024)
- [Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18482/) (2023)
- [Neural Feature Fusion Fields: 3D Distillation of Self-Supervised 2D Image Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03494/) (2022)
- [Depth-Regularized Optimization for 3D Gaussian Splatting in Few-Shot Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13398/) (2023)
- [Geometry-Aware Learning of Maps for Camera Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03342/) (2017)
- [Vox-Fusion: Dense Tracking and Mapping with Voxel-based Neural Implicit Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15858/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [What Is The Best 3D Scene Representation for Robotics? From Geometric to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03422/) (2025)
- [PanoGS: Gaussian-based Panoptic Segmentation for 3D Open Vocabulary Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18107/) (2025)
- [From Sparse to Dense: Camera Relocalization with Scene-Specific Detector from Feature Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19358/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Splatting Feature Fields for Privacy-Preserving Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23569/) (2025)
- [Dust to Tower: Coarse-to-Fine Photo-Realistic Scene Reconstruction from Sparse Uncalibrated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19518/) (2024)
- [Vision Pretraining for Dense Spatial Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05247/) (2026)
- [ETO:Efficient Transformer-based Local Feature Matching by Organizing Multiple Homography Hypotheses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22733/) (2024)
- [Faster and Better 3D Splatting via Group Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07608/) (2024)
- [One-Shot Refiner: Boosting Feed-forward Novel View Synthesis via One-Step Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14161/) (2026)
- [NeuraLoc: Visual Localization in Neural Implicit Map with Dual Complementary Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06117/) (2025)
- [GS-Scale: Unlocking Large-Scale 3D Gaussian Splatting Training via Host Offloading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15645/) (2025)
- [Reloc-VGGT: Visual Re-localization with Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21883/) (2025)
- [AtlasGS: Atlanta-world Guided Surface Reconstruction with Implicit Structured Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25129/) (2025)
- [LightCity: An Urban Dataset for Outdoor Inverse Rendering and Reconstruction under Multi-illumination Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01118/) (2026)
- [A Global Depth-Range-Free Multi-View Stereo Transformer Network with Pose Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01893/) (2024)
- [SplatPose: Geometry-Aware 6-DoF Pose Estimation from Single RGB Image via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05174/) (2025)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting aided Localization for Large and Complex Indoor-Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13803/) (2025)
- [Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting with Axis-Shared Rasterization and Order-independent Transmittance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07069/) (2025)
- [ProFuse: Efficient Cross-View Context Fusion for Open-Vocabulary 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04754/) (2026)
- [OnlinePG: Online Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Mapping with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18510/) (2026)
- [NimbusGS: Unified 3D Scene Reconstruction under Hybrid Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27228/) (2026)
- [3DGS_LSR:Large_Scale Relocation for Autonomous Driving Based on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05661/) (2025)
- [Camera Pose Refinement via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17876/) (2025)
- [ExGS: Extreme 3D Gaussian Compression with Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24758/) (2025)
- [3D Skew Gaussian Splatting with Any Camera Trajectory Visualization Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18334/) (2026)
- [Geometry Gaussians: Decoupling Appearance and Geometry in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05124/) (2026)
- [SF-Loc: A Visual Mapping and Geo-Localization System based on Sparse Visual Structure Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01500/) (2024)
- [A-SCoRe: Attention-based Scene Coordinate Regression for wide-ranging scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13982/) (2025)
- [SGLoc: Semantic Localization System for Camera Pose Estimation from 3D Gaussian Splatting Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12027/) (2025)
- [Hi^2-GSLoc: Dual-Hierarchical Gaussian-Specific Visual Relocalization for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15683/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual localization plays an important role in the applications of Augmented Reality (AR), which enable AR devices to obtain their 6-DoF pose in the pre-build map in order to render virtual content in real scenes. However, most existing approaches can not perform novel view rendering and require large storage capacities for maps. To overcome these limitations, we propose an efficient visual localization method capable of high-quality rendering with fewer parameters. Specifically, our approach leverages 3D Gaussian primitives as the scene representation. To ensure precise 2D-3D correspondences for pose estimation, we develop an unbiased 3D scene-specific descriptor decoder for Gaussian primitives, distilled from a constructed feature volume. Additionally, we introduce a salient 3D landmark selection algorithm that selects a suitable primitive subset based on the saliency score for localization. We further regularize key Gaussian primitives to prevent anisotropic effects, which also improves localization performance. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior or comparable rendering and localization performance to state-of-the-art implicit-based visual localization approaches. Project page: hrefhttps://zju3dv.github.io/splatlochttps://zju3dv.github.io/splatloc.