# GS-CPE: Unified 6-Degree-of-Freedom Camera Pose Estimation via 3D Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10938 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10938/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Aug 2026.

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

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [INeRF: Inverting Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05877/) (2020)
- [D2-Net: A Trainable CNN for Joint Detection and Description of Local Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03561/) (2019)
- [Back to the Feature: Learning Robust Camera Localization from Pixels to Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09213/) (2021)
- [Visual Camera Re-Localization from RGB and RGB-D Images Using DSAC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12324/) (2020)
- [DF-Net: Unsupervised Joint Learning of Depth and Flow using Cross-Task Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01649/) (2018)
- [LENS: Localization enhanced by NeRF synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06558/) (2021)
- [Learning Multi-Scene Absolute Pose Regression with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11468/) (2021)
- [Accelerated Coordinate Encoding: Learning to Relocalize in Minutes using RGB and Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14059/) (2023)
- [DFNet: Enhance Absolute Pose Regression with Direct Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00559/) (2022)
- [On the Limits of Pseudo Ground Truth in Visual Camera Re-localisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00524/) (2021)
- [Direct-PoseNet: Absolute Pose Regression with Photometric Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04073/) (2021)
- [GLACE: Global Local Accelerated Coordinate Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04340/) (2024)
- [CROSSFIRE: Camera Relocalization On Self-Supervised Features from an Implicit Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04869/) (2023)
- [FAST-LIVO2: Fast, Direct LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14035/) (2024)
- [Neural Refinement for Absolute Pose Regression with Feature Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10087/) (2023)
- [GS-CPR: Efficient Camera Pose Refinement via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11085/) (2024)
- [PNeRFLoc: Visual Localization with Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10649/) (2023)
- [GSplatLoc: Grounding Keypoint Descriptors into 3D Gaussian Splatting for Improved Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16502/) (2024)
- [3DGS-ReLoc: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Map Representation and Visual ReLocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11367/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Monocular Re-Localization: From the Perspective of Scene Map Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15643/) (2023)
- [HGSLoc: 3DGS-based Heuristic Camera Pose Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10925/) (2024)
- [View Invariant Learning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08831/) (2025)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting aided Localization for Large and Complex Indoor-Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13803/) (2025)
- [Joint Point Cloud and Image Based Localization For Efficient Inspection in Mixed Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02563/) (2018)
- [Structured-Li-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians Splatting with LiDAR Incorporation and Spatial Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27509/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite substantial progress in visual localization, from scene coordinate regression to direct camera pose regression, achieving both robust generalization and high accuracy remain challenging. This study introduces GS-CPE (Gaussian Splatting based Camera Pose Estimation), a coarse-to-fine framework for 6-DoF camera pose estimation that unifies geometry-based coarse pose estimation with robust 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) warping based pose refinement. GS-CPE first estimates a coarse pose via retrieval-guided geometric pose estimation on a 3DGS scene representation, then refines it by minimizing a visibility aware masked RGB warping objective in a multi-scale optimization framework, with adaptive re-rendering. Extensive experiments on indoor and outdoor benchmarks including 7Scenes, Cambridge Landmarks, FAST-LIVO2 datasets, and a custom dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming in both accuracy and generalization.