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<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-B2-2026-161-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>GDC: Geometric Diffusion Consistency for Weather-Robust 3D Point Cloud Segmentation</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Du</surname>
<given-names>Jing</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zelek</surname>
<given-names>John</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chapman</surname>
<given-names>Michael A.</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>Li</surname>
<given-names>Jonathan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Department of Civil Engineering, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Department of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada</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>161</fpage>
<lpage>168</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Jing Du 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-B2-2026/161/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-161-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/161/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-161-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/161/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-161-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/161/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-161-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Semantic segmentation of outdoor 3D point clouds degrades significantly under adverse weather, as rain, fog, and snow corrupt the geometric structure of LiDAR returns through backscatter insertion, range-dependent attenuation, and volumetric scattering. Existing domain generalization methods constrain feature values directly, which becomes less effective when weather-induced perturbations alter the local neighborhood topology that underlies feature aggregation. This work proposes Geometric Diffusion Consistency (GDC), a training-time regularizer that enforces consistent feature propagation behavior across geometrically divergent views of the same point cloud. A dual-view augmentation pipeline generates training pairs through weak and strong perturbations, where the strong branch incorporates dual-mode atmospheric extinction modeling, semantic-aware geometric corruption, and weather-coordinated structural perturbation. A lightweight learnable diffusion operator, implemented via sparse convolutions with a gated residual connection, propagates encoder bottleneck features through local voxel neighborhoods. The consistency loss aligns diffused representations at corresponding points across views, preserving topological relationships essential for dense prediction while allowing feature values to adapt to altered geometry. On the SemanticKITTI to SemanticSTF domain generalization benchmark, GDC achieves 38.6% mIoU, exceeding the previous best method by 3.8%, with consistent improvements across dense fog, light fog, rain, and snow conditions.</p>
</abstract>
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