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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-B2-2026-343-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Supercharging Thermal Gaussian Splatting with Depth Estimation</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Biswanath</surname>
<given-names>Manoj</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6372-671X</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>Cai</surname>
<given-names>Chenxin</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>Schieber</surname>
<given-names>Hannah</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Roth</surname>
<given-names>Daniel</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Busam</surname>
<given-names>Benjamin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Human-Centered Computing and Extended Reality Lab, TUM University Hospital, Clinic for Orthopedics and Sports Orthopedics, Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany</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>343</fpage>
<lpage>350</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Manoj Biswanath 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-B2-2026/343/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-343-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/343/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-343-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/343/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-343-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/343/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-343-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Efficient and robust 3D scene representation is crucial in autonomous driving, robotics, and related fields. While RGB images provide valuable content for 3D reconstruction, other modalities like thermal or depth can enable additional information on the environment. Lately, novel view synthesis methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting have started using multiple modalities to further boost their performance. But fusing or combining multimodal data can make the process slower and can bring in additional challenges. Therefore, our project aims to use single modality based on thermal infrared domain, by removing the reliance on visible light as much as possible. This single modality can be expected to be faster as it does not rely on multimodal data. We propose a method, &lt;em&gt;Thermal-to-Depth Gaussian Splatting (TDg)&lt;/em&gt;, that uses only thermal images and depth estimation in its architecture to derive the radiance fields. Our TDg method outperforms the MSMG (Multiple Single-Modal Gaussians) baseline in most cases on our test datasets, RGBT-Scenes and ThermalMix. On average, the rendering quality metrics such as learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of TDg are 1.12%, 0.034%, and 0.01% better than the baseline MSMG values. It also reduces the training time significantly, by 12 mins 47 secs (55% improvement). Overall, our method is successful in deriving these thermal radiance fields, which can ultimately have several applications, such as identifying heat sources critical in surveillance, search or rescue operations, and industrial inspections where temperature is widely used to monitor machines.</p>
</abstract>
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