LiDAR-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting with Differentiable UDF-Based Regularization for Mine Tunnel Reconstruction

Underground mine tunnels are often characterized by extremely uneven illumination, weak surface textures, and frequent dynamic interference, which severely undermine multi-view photometric consistency and easily induce floating artifacts and spatial divergence in conventional vision-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). To address these issues, we propose a LiDAR-guided 3DGS framework for underground tunnel reconstruction based on dynamic-object removal and differentiable unsigned distance field (UDF) regularization. First, a dynamic foreground removal strategy with background restoration is introduced to remove transient foreground disturbances and restore static supervision consistency. Second, LiDAR point clouds are leveraged to initialize Gaussian primitives with a reliable geometric skeleton in weak-texture regions. More importantly, LiDAR priors are further converted into a differentiable UDF field and serve as a persistent geometric constraint. A dual-track mechanism is designed, where continuous geometric attraction pulls mildly deviated Gaussians back toward the physical surface and periodic out-of-bound culling removes severely drifting primitives. Experiments on real underground tunnel and chamber scenes show a clear scene-dependent behavior of the proposed method. In the tunnel scene, the method achieves the best SSIM together with competitive PSNR and LPIPS, while also reducing redundant out-of-bound primitives and improving geometric cleanliness. In the chamber scene, however, its advantages under global full-reference metrics are less evident. These results suggest that the proposed LiDAR-guided and differentiable UDF-regularized framework is particularly beneficial for weak-texture tunnel environments, while further improvement is still needed for chamber scenes with more complex appearance variations.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Journal
Remote Sensing
Published
2026-04-30
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18091386
Primary Topic
3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

Funders

Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

LiDAR-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting with Differentiable UDF-Based Regularization for Mine Tunnel Reconstruction

Yajing Liu, Yuanpei Gou, Mei Li, Xinyu Wu et al.
Remote Sensing
3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage
article

LiDAR-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting with Differentiable UDF-Based Regularization for Mine Tunnel Reconstruction

Yajing Liu, Yuanpei Gou, Mei Li, Xinyu Wu, Huimin Guo
article en

Abstract

Underground mine tunnels are often characterized by extremely uneven illumination, weak surface textures, and frequent dynamic interference, which severely undermine multi-view photometric consistency and easily induce floating artifacts and spatial divergence in conventional vision-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). To address these issues, we propose a LiDAR-guided 3DGS framework for underground tunnel reconstruction based on dynamic-object removal and differentiable unsigned distance field (UDF) regularization. First, a dynamic foreground removal strategy with background restoration is introduced to remove transient foreground disturbances and restore static supervision consistency. Second, LiDAR point clouds are leveraged to initialize Gaussian primitives with a reliable geometric skeleton in weak-texture regions. More importantly, LiDAR priors are further converted into a differentiable UDF field and serve as a persistent geometric constraint. A dual-track mechanism is designed, where continuous geometric attraction pulls mildly deviated Gaussians back toward the physical surface and periodic out-of-bound culling removes severely drifting primitives. Experiments on real underground tunnel and chamber scenes show a clear scene-dependent behavior of the proposed method. In the tunnel scene, the method achieves the best SSIM together with competitive PSNR and LPIPS, while also reducing redundant out-of-bound primitives and improving geometric cleanliness. In the chamber scene, however, its advantages under global full-reference metrics are less evident. These results suggest that the proposed LiDAR-guided and differentiable UDF-regularized framework is particularly beneficial for weak-texture tunnel environments, while further improvement is still needed for chamber scenes with more complex appearance variations.

Remote SensingVol. 18(9)
North China University of Science and Technology (CN), Peking University (CN), China Metallurgical Geology Bureau (CN), Bureau of Geology and Mineral Exploration and Development of Guizhou Province (CN), Geological Exploration Institute of Shandong Zhengyuan (CN)
Hebei Provincial Department of Bureau of Science and Technology
Sustainable cities and communities
Openalex Percentile: Top 6%
3D Surveying and Cultural Heritage
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.