# ExploreGS: a vision-based low overhead framework for 3D scene reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10578 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10578/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [Global Structure-from-Motion Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20219/) (2024)
- [MASt3R-SfM: a Fully-Integrated Solution for Unconstrained Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19152/) (2024)
- [FUEL: Fast UAV Exploration using Incremental Frontier Structure and Hierarchical Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11561/) (2020)
- [Robust and Efficient Quadrotor Trajectory Generation for Fast Autonomous Flight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01531/) (2019)
- [GS-Planner: A Gaussian-Splatting-based Planning Framework for Active High-Fidelity Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10142/) (2024)
- [Splatfacto-W: A Nerfstudio Implementation of Gaussian Splatting for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12306/) (2024)
- [PredRecon: A Prediction-boosted Planning Framework for Fast and High-quality Autonomous Aerial Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04488/) (2023)
- [FC-Planner: A Skeleton-guided Planning Framework for Fast Aerial Coverage of Complex 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13882/) (2023)
- [Plan3D: Viewpoint and Trajectory Optimization for Aerial Multi-View Stereo Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09314/) (2017)
- [BioNeRF: Biologically Plausible Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07310/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a low-overhead, vision-based 3D scene reconstruction framework for drones, named ExploreGS. By using RGB images, ExploreGS replaces traditional lidar-based point cloud acquisition process with a vision model, achieving a high-quality reconstruction at a lower cost. The framework integrates scene exploration and model reconstruction, and leverags a Bag-of-Words(BoW) model to enable real-time processing capabilities, therefore, the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) training can be executed on-board. Comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the efficiency and applicability of the ExploreGS framework on resource-constrained devices, while maintaining reconstruction quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods.