# City-Mesh3R: Simulation-Ready City-Scale 3D Mesh Reconstruction from Multi-View Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30310 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30310/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2026.

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

- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03506/) (2018)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [MoGe: Unlocking Accurate Monocular Geometry Estimation for Open-Domain Images with Optimal Training Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19115/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Global Structure-from-Motion Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20219/) (2024)
- [A Hierarchical 3D Gaussian Representation for Real-Time Rendering of Very Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12080/) (2024)
- [VastGaussian: Vast 3D Gaussians for Large Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17427/) (2024)
- [CityGaussian: Real-time High-quality Large-Scale Scene Rendering with Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01133/) (2024)
- [Learning with Average Precision: Training Image Retrieval with a Listwise Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07589/) (2019)
- [MASt3R-SfM: a Fully-Integrated Solution for Unconstrained Structure-from-Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19152/) (2024)
- [3DGSR: Implicit Surface Reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00409/) (2024)
- [Robust Image Retrieval-based Visual Localization using Kapture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13867/) (2020)
- [DOGS: Distributed-Oriented Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale 3D Reconstruction Via Gaussian Consensus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13943/) (2024)
- [CityGaussianV2: Efficient and Geometrically Accurate Reconstruction for Large-Scale Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00771/) (2024)
- [MILo: Mesh-In-the-Loop Gaussian Splatting for Detailed and Efficient Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24096/) (2025)
- [Sparse Voxels Rasterization: Real-time High-fidelity Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04459/) (2024)
- [Horizon-GS: Unified 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale Aerial-to-Ground Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01745/) (2024)
- [CityGS-X: A Scalable Architecture for Efficient and Geometrically Accurate Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23044/) (2025)
- [MeshSplatting: Differentiable Rendering with Opaque Meshes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06818/) (2025)
- [GeoSVR: Taming Sparse Voxels for Geometrically Accurate Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18090/) (2025)
- [GauU-Scene: A Scene Reconstruction Benchmark on Large Scale 3D Reconstruction Dataset Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14032/) (2024)
- [SurfaceSplat: Connecting Surface Reconstruction and Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15602/) (2025)
- [SA-GS: Semantic-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Large Scene Reconstruction with Geometry Constrain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16923/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

City-scale 3D surface reconstruction from multiview images for downstream 3D simulation, poses highly challenging problems due to the scale and complexity of urban scenes. Existing city-scale 3D reconstruction methods based on NeRF, Gaussian Splatting etc. often fail to recover 3D meshes ready for simulation due to incomplete/missing geometry and irregular, noisy surfaces. Scaling existing small-scale 3D reconstruction methods to arbitrarily large urban scenes is highly infeasible due to their computational complexity. We present City-Mesh3R, a scalable framework for reconstructing watertight surface meshes directly from large unordered image collections. Unlike recent methods which use global sparse SfM point-cloud initialization followed by a distributed 3D dense reconstruction of large-scale scenes, our method follows an end-to-end images-to-mesh 3D reconstruction approach using a divide-and-conquer strategy. The sparse city map is reconstructed via topological image clustering, cluster-wise independent sparse SfM and map merging, without need for exhaustive image feature matching. Then this map is partitioned spatially to perform geometry-aware camera selection, followed by dense surface reconstruction and surface refinement using curvature-aware adaptive vertex density remeshing. These partition meshes are then stitched together to produce the global mesh of the city. The proposed end-to-end framework is evaluated on city-scale reconstruction datasets. As demonstrated by our qualitative and quantitative results, our proposed method yields high-fidelity watertight 3D meshes with regular geometry, capturing fine surface details, and is suitable for scaling to arbitrarily large scenes owing to the end-to-end processing in a distributed setting.
