Tortho–SatGS: A 3-D Gaussian Splatting-Based Method for True Orthophoto Generation From Multiview Satellite Imagery

Abstract

True digital orthophoto maps (TDOMs) accurately represent the true spatial positions and visual appearances of ground objects at the urban scale, and constitute a fundamental remote sensing product for large-scale urban digitization and fine-grained geographic modeling. Conventional TDOM generation methods that rely on digital elevation models (DEMs) or digital surface models (DSMs) are highly susceptible to occlusions and elevation errors in complex urban environments, often resulting in geometric distortions and visual artifacts. Neural radiance field (NeRF)-based approaches can mitigate these issues, but their high computational cost limits practical deployment on large-scale satellite imagery. To address these challenges, we present Tortho–SatGS, a pure vision-based framework that, to the best of our knowledge, is among the first to systematically integrate 3-D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into satellite true orthophoto generation. Specifically, we design a 3DGS-based geometric modeling pipeline tailored to satellite imaging geometry and introduce an orthographic rasterization-based rendering scheme to effectively resolve building side facades and edge curvature artifacts, enabling DEM/DSM-free TDOM generation with improved geometric consistency. In addition, a VGG-based perceptual loss is incorporated to complement pixel-level supervision, improving radiometric consistency and fine-grained texture fidelity, particularly in shadowed and low-texture regions. Experimental results on two real-world satellite datasets demonstrate that Tortho–SatGS consistently outperforms conventional methods in terms of geometric accuracy, texture quality, and radiometric consistency. Compared with NeRF-based approaches, our method achieves approximately $27\times $ faster training speed and $15\times $ faster rendering speed, effectively balancing reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency. These results validate the effectiveness and practical advantages of 3DGS-based approaches for the generation of true orthophotos of satellites.