# 3D Gaussian Flats: Hybrid 2D/3D Photometric Scene Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16423 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16423/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [ScanNet++: A High-Fidelity Dataset of 3D Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11417/) (2023)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03092/) (2023)
- [Advances in Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05849/) (2021)
- [PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06521/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09591/) (2024)
- [DN-Splatter: Depth and Normal Priors for Gaussian Splatting and Meshing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17822/) (2024)
- [Neural 3D Scene Reconstruction with the Manhattan-world Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02836/) (2022)
- [RaDe-GS: Rasterizing Depth in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01467/) (2024)
- [PlaneRCNN: 3D Plane Detection and Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04072/) (2018)
- [Bayes' Rays: Uncertainty Quantification for Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03185/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Shells for Efficient Neural Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10091/) (2023)
- [StructNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Indoor Scenes with Structural Hints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05277/) (2022)
- [PlanarRecon: Real-time 3D Plane Detection and Reconstruction from Posed Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07710/) (2022)
- [NeurMiPs: Neural Mixture of Planar Experts for View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13696/) (2022)
- [Fast View Synthesis of Casual Videos with Soup-of-Planes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02135/) (2023)
- [AirPlanes: Accurate Plane Estimation via 3D-Consistent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08960/) (2024)
- [PlanarSplatting: Accurate Planar Surface Reconstruction in 3 Minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03451/) (2024)
- [PlaneRecNet: Multi-Task Learning with Cross-Task Consistency for Piece-Wise Plane Detection and Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11219/) (2021)
- [Planar Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01931/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FLAT: Feedforward Latent Triangle Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24876/) (2026)
- [TopoGS: Planar Reconstruction via Topology-aware 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16838/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in radiance fields and novel view synthesis enable creation of realistic digital twins from photographs. However, current methods struggle with flat, texture-less surfaces, creating uneven and semi-transparent reconstructions, due to an ill-conditioned photometric reconstruction objective. Surface reconstruction methods solve this issue but sacrifice visual quality. We propose a novel hybrid 2D/3D representation that jointly optimizes constrained planar (2D) Gaussians for modeling flat surfaces and freeform (3D) Gaussians for the rest of the scene. Our end-to-end approach dynamically detects and refines planar regions, improving both visual fidelity and geometric accuracy. It achieves state-of-the-art depth estimation on ScanNet++ and ScanNetv2, and excels at mesh extraction without overfitting to a specific camera model, showing its effectiveness in producing high-quality reconstruction of indoor scenes.