# From Concept to Capability: Evaluating 3D Gaussian Splatting for Synthetic Scene Editing in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01995 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01995/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [NeuMan: Neural Human Radiance Field from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12575/) (2022)
- [Street Gaussians: Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01339/) (2024)
- [A survey of loss functions for semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14822/) (2020)
- [OmniRe: Omni Urban Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16760/) (2024)
- [Periodic Vibration Gaussian: Dynamic Urban Scene Reconstruction and Real-time Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18561/) (2023)
- [LGSVL Simulator: A High Fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03778/) (2020)
- [Zenseact Open Dataset: A large-scale and diverse multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02008/) (2023)
- [SplatAD: Real-Time Lidar and Camera Rendering with 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16816/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Autonomous Driving Datasets: Statistics, Annotation Quality, and a Future Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01454/) (2024)
- [Synthetic Datasets for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12205/) (2023)
- [DeformGS: Scene Flow in Highly Deformable Scenes for Deformable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00583/) (2023)
- [DistillNeRF: Perceiving 3D Scenes from Single-Glance Images by Distilling Neural Fields and Foundation Model Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12095/) (2024)
- [Welcome Your New AI Teammate: On Safety Analysis by Leashing Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09565/) (2024)
- [The DevSafeOps Dilemma: A Systematic Literature Review on Rapidity in Safe Autonomous Driving Development and Operation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21693/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The perception of an Autonomous Driving System (ADS) critically depends on relevant, comprehensive, and diverse datasets to ensure its safety while operating in the environment. Field data collection lacks completeness with respect to the list of rare but still possible safety-related scenarios needed for the development, verification, and validation of the ADS. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown promising capabilities for the reconstruction and editing of scenes based on data collected by cameras and LiDAR sensors. However, the industrial fidelity evaluation of reconstructions is underexplored, which is crucial when employing such methods in safety-related systems, especially for ADS. This becomes more challenging as ADS operates in a dynamic, uncontrolled environment with limited viewpoints and often partially occluded objects. This paper addresses this gap by proposing and implementing a framework (Fig. 1) to systematically analyze the capabilities and limitations of 3DGS for use in the reconstruction of safety-related scenes. It focuses on the quality of reconstruction for vehicles and pedestrians, which are the two most critical object classes for ADS. Our findings provide industry insights into the fidelity degradation of reconstructions from multiple novel viewpoints, both lateral and longitudinal, enabling the integration of these methods into real-world industrial AD software development and testing pipelines.