# LiDAR-3DGS: LiDAR Reinforced 3D Gaussian Splatting for Multimodal Radiance Field Rendering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.16296 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16296/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [R3LIVE: A Robust, Real-time, RGB-colored, LiDAR-Inertial-Visual tightly-coupled state Estimation and mapping package](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07982/) (2021)
- [LIC-Fusion 2.0: LiDAR-Inertial-Camera Odometry with Sliding-Window Plane-Feature Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07196/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [A Constrained Optimization Approach for Gaussian Splatting from Coarsely-posed Images and Noisy Lidar Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09129/) (2025)
- [MrGS: Multi-modal Radiance Fields with 3D Gaussian Splatting for RGB-Thermal Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22997/) (2025)
- [PRISM: Color-Stratified Point Cloud Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06839/) (2026)
- [Structured-Li-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians Splatting with LiDAR Incorporation and Spatial Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27509/) (2026)
- [SARA: Scene-Aware Reconstruction Accelerator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06831/) (2026)
- [Optimizing 3D Gaussian Splatting via Point Cloud Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00450/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we explore the capabilities of multimodal inputs to 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based Radiance Field Rendering. We present LiDAR-3DGS, a novel method of reinforcing 3DGS inputs with LiDAR generated point clouds to significantly improve the accuracy and detail of 3D models. We demonstrate a systematic approach of LiDAR reinforcement to 3DGS to enable capturing of important features such as bolts, apertures, and other details that are often missed by image-based features alone. These details are crucial for engineering applications such as remote monitoring and maintenance. Without modifying the underlying 3DGS algorithm, we demonstrate that even a modest addition of LiDAR generated point cloud significantly enhances the perceptual quality of the models. At 30k iterations, the model generated by our method resulted in an increase of 7.064% in PSNR and 0.565% in SSIM, respectively. Since the LiDAR used in this research was a commonly used commercial-grade device, the improvements observed were modest and can be further enhanced with higher-grade LiDAR systems. Additionally, these improvements can be supplementary to other derivative works of Radiance Field Rendering and also provide a new insight for future LiDAR and computer vision integrated modeling.