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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</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-annals-XI-2-2026-303-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>SF-Recon: Simplification-Free Lightweight Building Reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Splatting</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Zihan</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>Wang</surname>
<given-names>Tengfei</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>Gan</surname>
<given-names>Wentian</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>Zhan</surname>
<given-names>Hao</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>Wang</surname>
<given-names>Xin</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>Zhan</surname>
<given-names>Zongqian</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>03</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-2-2026</volume>
<fpage>303</fpage>
<lpage>311</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Zihan Li 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-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/303/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-303-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/303/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-303-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/303/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-303-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/303/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-303-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>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 &lt;em&gt;SF&lt;/em&gt; 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.</p>
</abstract>
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