# TreeDGS: Aerial Gaussian Splatting for Distant DBH Measurement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12823 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12823/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Global Structure-from-Motion Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20219/) (2024)
- [RaDe-GS: Rasterizing Depth in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01467/) (2024)
- [Relaxing Accurate Initialization Constraint for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09413/) (2024)
- [Sparse2DGS: Geometry-Prioritized Gaussian Splatting for Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20378/) (2025)
- [ForestFormer3D: A Unified Framework for End-to-End Segmentation of Forest LiDAR 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16991/) (2025)
- [TopicFM+: Boosting Accuracy and Efficiency of Topic-Assisted Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00485/) (2023)
- [RLGS: Reinforcement Learning-Based Adaptive Hyperparameter Tuning for Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04078/) (2025)
- [NeRF-Accelerated Ecological Monitoring in Mixed-Evergreen Redwood Forest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07418/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Aerial remote sensing efficiently surveys large areas, but accurate direct object-level measurement remains difficult in complex natural scenes. Advancements in 3D computer vision, particularly radiance field representations such as NeRF and 3D Gaussian splatting, can improve reconstruction fidelity from posed imagery. Nevertheless, direct aerial measurement of important attributes like tree diameter at breast height (DBH) remains challenging. Trunks in aerial forest scans are distant and sparsely observed in image views; at typical operating altitudes, stems may span only a few pixels. With these constraints, conventional reconstruction methods have inaccurate breast-height trunk geometry. TreeDGS is an aerial image reconstruction method that uses 3D Gaussian splatting as a continuous scene representation for trunk measurement. After SfM--MVS initialization and Gaussian optimization, we extract a dense point set from the Gaussian field using RaDe-GS's depth-aware cumulative-opacity integration and associate each sample with a multi-view opacity reliability score. Then, we isolate trunk points and estimate DBH using opacity-weighted solid-circle fitting. Evaluated on 10 plots with field-measured DBH, TreeDGS reaches 4.79 cm RMSE (about 2.6 pixels at this GSD) and outperforms a LiDAR baseline (7.66 cm RMSE). This shows that TreeDGS can enable accurate, low-cost aerial DBH measurement .