# HUG: Hierarchical Urban Gaussian Splatting with Block-Based Reconstruction for Large-Scale Aerial Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16606 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16606/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [LightGaussian: Unbounded 3D Gaussian Compression with 15x Reduction and 200+ FPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17245/) (2023)
- [Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-time Rendering with Implicit 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10994/) (2021)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [Octree-GS: Towards Consistent Real-time Rendering with LOD-Structured 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17898/) (2024)
- [MERF: Memory-Efficient Radiance Fields for Real-time View Synthesis in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12249/) (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)
- [Pixel-Perfect Structure-from-Motion with Featuremetric Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08291/) (2021)
- [CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01133/) (2024)
- [MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16553/) (2023)
- [SinNeRF: Training Neural Radiance Fields on Complex Scenes from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00928/) (2022)
- [Compact 3D Scene Representation via Self-Organizing Gaussian Grids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13299/) (2023)
- [PF3plat: Pose-Free Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22128/) (2024)
- [Efficient Large-scale Scene Representation with a Hybrid of High-resolution Grid and Plane Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03003/) (2023)
- [LetsGo: Large-Scale Garage Modeling and Rendering via LiDAR-Assisted Gaussian Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09748/) (2024)
- [GigaGS: Scaling up Planar-Based 3D Gaussians for Large Scene Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06685/) (2024)
- [City-on-Web: Real-time Neural Rendering of Large-scale Scenes on the Web](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16457/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [BlitzGS: City-Scale Gaussian Splatting at Lightning Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13794/) (2026)
- [ChronoGS: Disentangling Invariants and Changes in Multi-Period Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18794/) (2025)
- [Splaxel: Efficient Distributed Training of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Scene Reconstruction via Pixel-level Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18588/) (2026)
- [City-Level 3D Surface Reconstruction with Viewpoint Orientation Partitioning and Scene Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03771/) (2026)
- [CUS-GS: A Compact Unified Structured Gaussian Splatting Framework for Multimodal Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17904/) (2025)
- [GVGS: Gaussian Visibility-Aware Multi-View Geometry for Accurate Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20331/) (2026)
- [VDGS: Visibility-Driven Large-Scale 3D Gaussian Splatting for Aerial Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23049/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3DGS is an emerging and increasingly popular technology in the field of novel view synthesis. Its highly realistic rendering quality and real-time rendering capabilities make it promising for various applications. However, when applied to large-scale aerial urban scenes, 3DGS methods suffer from issues such as excessive memory consumption, slow training times, prolonged partitioning processes, and significant degradation in rendering quality due to the increased data volume. To tackle these challenges, we introduce HUG, a novel approach that enhances data partitioning and reconstruction quality by leveraging a hierarchical neural Gaussian representation. We first propose a visibility-based data partitioning method that is simple yet highly efficient, significantly outperforming existing methods in speed. Then, we introduce a novel hierarchical weighted training approach, combined with other optimization strategies, to substantially improve reconstruction quality. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on one synthetic dataset and four real-world datasets.