SF-Recon: Simplification-Free Lightweight Building Reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract. Lightweight building surface models are crucial for digital city, navigation, and fast geospatial analytics, yet conventional multi-view geometry pipelines remain cumbersome and quality-sensitive due to their reliance on dense reconstruction, meshing, and subsequent simplification. This work presents SF-Recon, a method that directly reconstructs lightweight building surfaces from multi-view images without post-hoc mesh simplification. We first train an initial 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) field to obtain a view-consistent representation. Building structure is then distilled by a normal-gradient-guided Gaussian optimization that selects primitives aligned with roof and wall boundaries, followed by multi-view edge-consistency pruning to enhance structural sharpness and suppress non-structural artifacts without external supervision. Finally, a multi-view depth-constrained Delaunay triangulation converts the structured Gaussian field into a lightweight, structurally faithful building mesh. Based on a proposed SF dataset, the experimental results demonstrate that our SF-Recon can directly reconstruct lightweight building models from multi-view imagery, achieving substantially fewer faces and vertices while maintaining computational efficiency.