SatSurfGS: Generalizable 2D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-View Satellite Surface Reconstruction

TL;DR

SatSurfGS introduces a novel generalizable 2D Gaussian Splatting framework for sparse-view satellite surface reconstruction, addressing heterogeneity and reliability issues in multi-view matching.

Contribution

It proposes a coarse-to-fine Gaussian attribute prediction with local geometric reliability modeling, including confidence-aware feature fusion and residual guidance modules.

Findings

Improves rendering quality and surface reconstruction accuracy.

Demonstrates better cross-dataset generalization.

Achieves higher inference efficiency compared to baselines.

Abstract

Sparse-view satellite image surface reconstruction remains highly challenging, fundamentally because the reliability of multi-view matching under satellite imaging conditions is strongly spatially heterogeneous. Affected by large photometric differences, weak textures, and repetitive textures, multi-view geometric constraints are often sparse, unevenly distributed, and locally unreliable. Although 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) is more suitable than 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for the explicit representation of continuous surfaces, research on generalizable feed-forward 2DGS frameworks for sparse-view satellite surface reconstruction is still lacking. To address this issue, we propose SatSurfGS, a generalizable sparse-view surface reconstruction method for satellite imagery based on 2DGS. The proposed method builds a coarse-to-fine Gaussian attribute prediction framework and explicitly models local geometric reliability at three levels: feature learning, Gaussian parameter estimation, and training optimization. Specifically, we propose a confidence-aware monocular multi-view feature fusion module to adaptively integrate monocular priors and multi-view matching features according to local confidence; a cross-stage self-consistency residual guidance module to stabilize stage-wise Gaussian parameter refinement using the residual between the rendered height map from the previous stage and the current-stage MVS height map, together with confidence information; and a confidence bidirectional routing loss to achieve differentiated allocation of geometric and appearance supervision. Experiments on satellite datasets show that the proposed method achieves improved rendering quality, surface reconstruction accuracy, cross-dataset generalization, and inference efficiency compared with representative generalizable baselines and competitive per-scene optimization methods.