Bundle-Adjusted Initialization for Efficient Earth Observation Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

Abstract. Satellite imagery offers a distinct advantage in Earth observation by providing expansive coverage and enabling the monitoring of inaccessible regions without physical on-site intervention, serving as a significantly more cost-effective and scalable alternative to traditional aerial or ground-based surveys. The task of 3D reconstruction from multi-view satellite images has therefore been a pivotal point of research at the intersection of photogrammetry and remote sensing. Recently, novel-view synthesis techniques such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have accelerated the accuracy and speed of topographic modeling. Among these, Earth Observation Gaussian Splatting (EOGS) has emerged as a state-of-the-art approach by adapting 3DGS to handle the unique geometric and radiometric characteristics of satellite data, including Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPCs) and varying solar conditions. However, the standard EOGS pipeline relies on stochastic initialization, where Gaussians are distributed uniformly within a volumetric bounding box, leading to high computational overhead and dependency on aggressive pruning that can inadvertently remove critical geometric features, particularly in areas with complex urban structures. To address these limitations, we propose Bundle-Adjusted Initialization for Earth Observation Gaussian Splatting, which leverages sparse point clouds from bundle adjustment as geometric priors for Gaussian initialization. Combined with an adaptive densification strategy, our method achieves faster convergence and improved DSM accuracy on the DFC2019 dataset compared to the EOGS baseline.