# VDGS: Visibility-Driven Large-Scale 3D Gaussian Splatting for Aerial Scene Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23049/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11215/) (2021)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03092/) (2023)
- [Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10703/) (2021)
- [Octree-GS: Towards Consistent Real-time Rendering with LOD-Structured 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17898/) (2024)
- [BungeeNeRF: Progressive Neural Radiance Field for Extreme Multi-scale Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05504/) (2021)
- [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)
- [MatrixCity: A Large-scale City Dataset for City-scale Neural Rendering and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16553/) (2023)
- [SLAM3R: Real-Time Dense Scene Reconstruction from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09401/) (2024)
- [Grid-guided Neural Radiance Fields for Large Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14001/) (2023)
- [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)
- [LONG3R: Long Sequence Streaming 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18255/) (2025)
- [Binary Opacity Grids: Capturing Fine Geometric Detail for Mesh-Based View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12377/) (2024)
- [Driv3R: Learning Dense 4D Reconstruction for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06777/) (2024)
- [Momentum-GS: Momentum Gaussian Self-Distillation for High-Quality Large Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04887/) (2024)
- [PyNeRF: Pyramidal Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00252/) (2023)
- [PredRecon: A Prediction-boosted Planning Framework for Fast and High-quality Autonomous Aerial Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04488/) (2023)
- [HUG: Hierarchical Urban Gaussian Splatting with Block-Based Reconstruction for Large-Scale Aerial Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16606/) (2025)
- [Vision-based Large-scale 3D Semantic Mapping for Autonomous Driving Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01087/) (2022)
- [Learning Heterogeneous Mixture of Scene Experts for Large-scale Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02005/) (2025)
- [Holistic Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction via Mixed Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23280/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale scene reconstruction is a critical foundational technology in robotic autonomous systems such as 3D mapping and autonomous driving. In recent years, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated remarkable advantages in both visual quality and computational efficiency, making it a promising representation for large-scale scene reconstruction. However, it still faces challenges in large-scale scenes, including excessive memory consumption and uneven viewpoint coverage caused by UAV acquisition, limiting its real-world applications. To address this, we propose VDGS, a novel 3DGS framework that incorporates camera distribution into scene modeling. VDGS introduces visibility-driven statistics for scene anchors to quantify supervision strength. These statistics are further leveraged for scene partitioning and for gradient compensation in under-optimized regions, thereby promoting balanced optimization across different regions. Extensive experiments on multiple large-scale aerial scene datasets demonstrate that, under imbalanced viewpoint distributions, VDGS consistently outperforms existing methods, while maintaining competitive performance in scenarios with more uniform view distributions.