<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD Journal Publishing DTD v3.0 20080202//EN" "https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/nlm-dtd/publishing/3.0/journalpublishing3.dtd">
<article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="research-article" dtd-version="3.0" xml:lang="en">
<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1303-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>SPARC: Scalable 3D Panoptic Segmentation with Reinforcement-driven Clustering</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Huang</surname>
<given-names>Haoling</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2460-664X</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Han</surname>
<given-names>Ting</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0002-9474-8337</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ouyang</surname>
<given-names>Jie</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chen</surname>
<given-names>Yiping</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>School of System Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>School of Geospatial Engineering and Science, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>23</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-B2-2026</volume>
<fpage>1303</fpage>
<lpage>1310</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Haoling Huang et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/1303/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1303-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/1303/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1303-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/1303/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1303-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/1303/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-1303-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Large-scale 3D panoptic segmentation is critical for digital twins and geospatial analysis, demanding models that process massive point clouds while distinguishing instances across highly diverse spatial scales. However, prevailing graph-based approaches rely on one-shot optimization, suffering from &lt;em&gt;short-sighted decisions&lt;/em&gt; where irreversible local errors propagate globally, leading to severe under-segmentation at boundaries between objects of disparate scales. To overcome this short-sightedness, we present &lt;em&gt;SPARC&lt;/em&gt;, a scalable framework that reframes graph clustering as a sequential, self-correcting decision process driven by hierarchical reinforcement learning. Specifically, SPARC employs a dual-level agent where a meta-controller adaptively determines instance completeness while a low-level policy iteratively refines edge affinities, enabling the model to revise early mistakes based on long-horizon rewards rather than greedy local cues. Complementing this, we introduce Semantic Voxel Partitioning (SVP) to generate semantically coherent superpoints, ensuring robust primitives that mitigate noise before clustering begins. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPARC achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DALES dataset with a Panoptic Quality of 62.4%, surpassing existing methods by 9.8% and effectively resolving multi-scale segmentation ambiguities.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="8"/></counts>
</article-meta>
</front>
<body/>
<back>
</back>
</article>