UH-GS: Uncertainty-aware hierarchical Gaussian splatting for outdoor scene reconstruction

Abstract

Abstract. In outdoor scene reconstruction, dynamic occlusions and multiscale structures often undermine multiview consistency and hinder effective gradient accumulation of high-frequency Gaussian primitives, leading to artifacts and the loss of fine details in Gaussian splatting–based radiance field methods. To address these challenges, we propose an uncertainty-aware hierarchical Gaussian splatting framework for outdoor 3D reconstruction. Specifically, our method constructs a hierarchical octree-based spatial representation from the results of aerial triangulation. It introduces level of detail constraints to enable structured management and progressive optimization of Gaussian primitives across different scales. This design effectively alleviates the imbalance in training and the redundant growth of Gaussian primitives commonly observed in multiscale outdoor scenes. In addition, we incorporate an uncertainty prediction mechanism that evaluates the consistency between rendered results and ground-truth images in the feature space, allowing the model to automatically identify dynamically occluded regions and suppress their gradient contributions during optimization. As a result, the adverse impact of dynamic artifacts on static scene modeling is substantially reduced. Experimental results demonstrate that, without incurring significant additional training overhead, our method consistently improves structural consistency and fine-detail reconstruction quality in outdoor scenes, while simultaneously reducing model complexity and maintaining real-time rendering performance. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be seamlessly integrated into multiple mainstream Gaussian splatting frameworks, exhibiting strong robustness and promising potential for practical deployment.