HLC-GS: Risk-Map-Guided Height-Layer Consistency Gaussian Splatting for DSM Reconstruction from Optical Satellite Imagery
Jie Yang, Yingdong Pi, Qiyan Luo, Xiaoyu Wang, Lekang Wen, Mi Wang
Abstract
A Digital Surface Model (DSM) is a fundamental geospatial data product for representing the elevation of the Earth's surface. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown considerable potential for DSM reconstruction from multi-view optical satellite imagery due to its explicit scene representation and efficient optimization. However, in 3DGS-based DSM generation, alpha-weighted aggregation of Gaussian altitudes may blend splats from different height layers at the same rendered pixel or DSM sampling location, producing non-physical intermediate elevations and height-layer mixing errors. To address this problem, we propose HLC-GS, a risk-map-guided height-layer consistency Gaussian Splatting method for DSM reconstruction from optical satellite imagery. HLC-GS consists of a risk map module, a dominant-layer reliability correction module, and a secondary-layer suppression module. The risk map localizes high-risk pixels with abnormal height dispersion and unreliable dominant-layer responses, while the latter two modules regularize unreliable dominant-layer responses and suppress weakly supported far secondary-layer responses. Extensive experiments are conducted on the DFC2019 and IARPA2016 datasets. Compared with six state-of-the-art DSM reconstruction methods, HLC-GS achieves better overall accuracy. Compared with the latest and precision-enhanced EOGS, HLC-GS reduces the average MAE from 1.46 m to 1.18 m and the average RMSE from 2.78 m to 2.58 m over the evaluated scenes, while improving PAG$_{2.5}$ from 86.09\% to 88.61\%. Overall, these results demonstrate that explicitly modeling per-pixel height-layer consistency alleviates height-layer mixing and improves the geometric quality of 3DGS-based DSM reconstruction from optical satellite imagery.