From Orbit to Ground: Generative City Photogrammetry from Extreme Off-Nadir Satellite Images

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yu, Fei, Liu, Yu, Tang, Luyang, Sun, Mingchao, Ge, Zengye, Bu, Rui, Jin, Yuchao, Zhao, Haisen, Sun, He, Li, Yangyan, Xu, Mu, Chen, Wenzheng, Chen, Baoquan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yu, Fei
Liu, Yu
Tang, Luyang
Sun, Mingchao
Ge, Zengye
Bu, Rui
Jin, Yuchao
Zhao, Haisen
Sun, He
Li, Yangyan
Xu, Mu
Chen, Wenzheng
Chen, Baoquan
author_facet Yu, Fei
Liu, Yu
Tang, Luyang
Sun, Mingchao
Ge, Zengye
Bu, Rui
Jin, Yuchao
Zhao, Haisen
Sun, He
Li, Yangyan
Xu, Mu
Chen, Wenzheng
Chen, Baoquan
contents City-scale 3D reconstruction from satellite imagery presents the challenge of extreme viewpoint extrapolation, where our goal is to synthesize ground-level novel views from sparse orbital images with minimal parallax. This requires inferring nearly $90^\circ$ viewpoint gaps from image sources with severely foreshortened facades and flawed textures, causing state-of-the-art reconstruction engines such as NeRF and 3DGS to fail. To address this problem, we propose two design choices tailored for city structures and satellite inputs. First, we model city geometry as a 2.5D height map, implemented as a Z-monotonic signed distance field (SDF) that matches urban building layouts from top-down viewpoints. This stabilizes geometry optimization under sparse, off-nadir satellite views and yields a watertight mesh with crisp roofs and clean, vertically extruded facades. Second, we paint the mesh appearance from satellite images via differentiable rendering techniques. While the satellite inputs may contain long-range, blurry captures, we further train a generative texture restoration network to enhance the appearance, recovering high-frequency, plausible texture details from degraded inputs. Our method's scalability and robustness are demonstrated through extensive experiments on large-scale urban reconstruction. For example, in our teaser figure, we reconstruct a $4\,\mathrm{km}^2$ real-world region from only a few satellite images, achieving state-of-the-art performance in synthesizing photorealistic ground views. The resulting models are not only visually compelling but also serve as high-fidelity, application-ready assets for downstream tasks like urban planning and simulation. Project page can be found at https://pku-vcl-geometry.github.io/Orbit2Ground/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07527
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Orbit to Ground: Generative City Photogrammetry from Extreme Off-Nadir Satellite Images
Yu, Fei
Liu, Yu
Tang, Luyang
Sun, Mingchao
Ge, Zengye
Bu, Rui
Jin, Yuchao
Zhao, Haisen
Sun, He
Li, Yangyan
Xu, Mu
Chen, Wenzheng
Chen, Baoquan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
City-scale 3D reconstruction from satellite imagery presents the challenge of extreme viewpoint extrapolation, where our goal is to synthesize ground-level novel views from sparse orbital images with minimal parallax. This requires inferring nearly $90^\circ$ viewpoint gaps from image sources with severely foreshortened facades and flawed textures, causing state-of-the-art reconstruction engines such as NeRF and 3DGS to fail. To address this problem, we propose two design choices tailored for city structures and satellite inputs. First, we model city geometry as a 2.5D height map, implemented as a Z-monotonic signed distance field (SDF) that matches urban building layouts from top-down viewpoints. This stabilizes geometry optimization under sparse, off-nadir satellite views and yields a watertight mesh with crisp roofs and clean, vertically extruded facades. Second, we paint the mesh appearance from satellite images via differentiable rendering techniques. While the satellite inputs may contain long-range, blurry captures, we further train a generative texture restoration network to enhance the appearance, recovering high-frequency, plausible texture details from degraded inputs. Our method's scalability and robustness are demonstrated through extensive experiments on large-scale urban reconstruction. For example, in our teaser figure, we reconstruct a $4\,\mathrm{km}^2$ real-world region from only a few satellite images, achieving state-of-the-art performance in synthesizing photorealistic ground views. The resulting models are not only visually compelling but also serve as high-fidelity, application-ready assets for downstream tasks like urban planning and simulation. Project page can be found at https://pku-vcl-geometry.github.io/Orbit2Ground/.
title From Orbit to Ground: Generative City Photogrammetry from Extreme Off-Nadir Satellite Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07527