# Sat2City v2: Native 3D City Asset Generation from a Single Satellite Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24138 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24138/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 87 of its 98 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 87)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [LRM: Large Reconstruction Model for Single Image to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04400/) (2023)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [3DShape2VecSet: A 3D Shape Representation for Neural Fields and Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11445/) (2023)
- [CLAY: A Controllable Large-scale Generative Model for Creating High-quality 3D Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13897/) (2024)
- [InstantMesh: Efficient 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image with Sparse-view Large Reconstruction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07191/) (2024)
- [ABO: Dataset and Benchmarks for Real-World 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06199/) (2021)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12202/) (2025)
- [MeshGPT: Generating Triangle Meshes with Decoder-Only Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15475/) (2023)
- [TripoSR: Fast 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02151/) (2024)
- [VIGOR: Cross-View Image Geo-localization beyond One-to-one Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12172/) (2020)
- [XCube: Large-Scale 3D Generative Modeling using Sparse Voxel Hierarchies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03806/) (2023)
- [Wide-Area Image Geolocalization with Aerial Reference Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03743/) (2015)
- [Lending Orientation to Neural Networks for Cross-view Geo-localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12351/) (2019)
- [Native and Compact Structured Latents for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14692/) (2025)
- [Habitat Synthetic Scenes Dataset (HSSD-200): An Analysis of 3D Scene Scale and Realism Tradeoffs for ObjectGoal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11290/) (2023)
- [SceneScape: Text-Driven Consistent Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01133/) (2023)

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

- [GS-Voxel: Fitting-Free Structured Latents for Large-Scale 3DGS Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17988/) (2026)
- [KODAMA: Multimodal Digital Twin Reconstruction for Urban RF Propagation Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07298/) (2026)
- [CityCode: Building Agent-Operable 3D Cities from Sparse Aerial Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18342/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating explicit textured 3D city assets from a single satellite image is important for urban simulation and digital twins. Most prior methods, however, learn 3D proxies optimized for rendering street-view images or videos over prescribed viewpoints and trajectories, rather than producing explicit 3D assets. Our previous framework, Sat2City, took a first step toward this goal with task-specific cascaded sparse-voxel latent diffusion conditioned on satellite-derived height maps. However, it relied on synthetic data and did not condition appearance on the satellite input. To address these limitations, we present Sat2City v2, a framework for generating explicit textured 3D city assets directly from real satellite images. We first construct a real-world dataset of 16,027 geographically matched but weakly aligned satellite-image-textured-mesh pairs, comprising 14,651 training pairs and 1,376 held-out test pairs. Building on this dataset, Sat2City v2 uses a native structured-latent 3D prior pretrained on curated assets to anchor geospatial adaptation to its asset manifold. We empirically demonstrate that weakly aligned satellite images and regional textured 3D meshes can support asset-level conditional generation: learned attention lets satellite tokens steer geometry generation without calibrated pixel-to-surface correspondence, while the generated geometry anchors satellite-guided material synthesis. Sat2City v2 ranks first among the evaluated baselines on every reported metric across geometry accuracy, generative mesh quality, and satellite-to-asset feature alignment.