# SatSurfGS: Generalizable 2D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-View Satellite Surface Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07181/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [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)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [pixelSplat: 3D Gaussian Splats from Image Pairs for Scalable Generalizable 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12337/) (2023)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [DepthSplat: Connecting Gaussian Splatting and Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13862/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)
- [Octree-GS: Towards Consistent Real-time Rendering with LOD-Structured 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17898/) (2024)
- [Deep Stereo using Adaptive Thin Volume Representation with Uncertainty Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12012/) (2019)
- [TranSplat: Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13770/) (2024)
- [Sat-NeRF: Learning Multi-View Satellite Photogrammetry With Transient Objects and Shadow Modeling Using RPC Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08896/) (2022)
- [HiSplat: Hierarchical 3D Gaussian Splatting for Generalizable Sparse-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06245/) (2024)
- [Semantic Stereo for Incidental Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08739/) (2018)
- [FreeSplatter: Pose-free Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-view 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09573/) (2024)
- [Splatter-360: Generalizable 360circ Gaussian Splatting for Wide-baseline Panoramic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06250/) (2024)
- [SparseSat-NeRF: Dense Depth Supervised Neural Radiance Fields for Sparse Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00277/) (2023)
- [Skyfall-GS: Synthesizing Immersive 3D Urban Scenes from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15869/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Satellite Image Photogrammetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13047/) (2024)
- [SkySplat: Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting from Multi-Temporal Sparse Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09479/) (2025)
- [GS4Buildings: Prior-Guided Gaussian Splatting for 3D Building Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07355/) (2025)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Geometry for Sparse-View Splatting via Cascade Depth Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22279/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Entropy Fields: Driving Adaptive Sparsity in 3D Gaussian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04542/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [GeoRay: Gauge-Aware Feed-Forward Satellite 3D Reconstruction in the Geodetic Frame](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29680/) (2026)
- [Robust 3D Reconstruction from Multi-View Optical Satellite Imagery via Reliability-Aware Height-Evidence Fusion in Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16772/) (2026)
- [Agentic Building-Aware Satellite Gaussian Splatting for Auditable Urban DSM Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25578/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sparse-view satellite image surface reconstruction remains highly challenging, fundamentally because the reliability of multi-view matching under satellite imaging conditions is strongly spatially heterogeneous. Affected by large photometric differences, weak textures, and repetitive textures, multi-view geometric constraints are often sparse, unevenly distributed, and locally unreliable. Although 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) is more suitable than 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for the explicit representation of continuous surfaces, research on generalizable feed-forward 2DGS frameworks for sparse-view satellite surface reconstruction is still lacking. To address this issue, we propose SatSurfGS, a generalizable sparse-view surface reconstruction method for satellite imagery based on 2DGS. The proposed method builds a coarse-to-fine Gaussian attribute prediction framework and explicitly models local geometric reliability at three levels: feature learning, Gaussian parameter estimation, and training optimization. Specifically, we propose a confidence-aware monocular multi-view feature fusion module to adaptively integrate monocular priors and multi-view matching features according to local confidence; a cross-stage self-consistency residual guidance module to stabilize stage-wise Gaussian parameter refinement using the residual between the rendered height map from the previous stage and the current-stage MVS height map, together with confidence information; and a confidence bidirectional routing loss to achieve differentiated allocation of geometric and appearance supervision. Experiments on satellite datasets show that the proposed method achieves improved rendering quality, surface reconstruction accuracy, cross-dataset generalization, and inference efficiency compared with representative generalizable baselines and competitive per-scene optimization methods.