# ICP-3DGS: SfM-free 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Unbounded Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21629 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21629/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [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)
- [BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06405/) (2021)
- [KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13410/) (2021)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [NoPe-NeRF: Optimising Neural Radiance Field with No Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07388/) (2022)
- [COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07504/) (2023)
- [Revising Densification in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06109/) (2024)
- [GARF: Gaussian Activated Radiance Fields for High Fidelity Reconstruction and Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05735/) (2022)
- [Tangent Space Backpropagation for 3D Transformation Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12032/) (2021)
- [Free-SurGS: SfM-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting for Surgical Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02918/) (2024)
- [IncEventGS: Pose-Free Gaussian Splatting from a Single Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08107/) (2024)
- [Lightning NeRF: Efficient Hybrid Scene Representation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05907/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [MOGS: Monocular Object-guided Gaussian Splatting in Large Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06685/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, neural rendering methods such as NeRFs and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have made significant progress in scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, they heavily rely on preprocessed camera poses and 3D structural priors from structure-from-motion (SfM), which are challenging to obtain in outdoor scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose to incorporate Iterative Closest Point (ICP) with optimization-based refinement to achieve accurate camera pose estimation under large camera movements. Additionally, we introduce a voxel-based scene densification approach to guide the reconstruction in large-scale scenes. Experiments demonstrate that our approach ICP-3DGS outperforms existing methods in both camera pose estimation and novel view synthesis across indoor and outdoor scenes of various scales. Source code is available at https://github.com/Chenhao-Z/ICP-3DGS.