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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-2-2026-411-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>CityLangSplat: Integrating CityGML Semantics into 3D Language Gaussian Splatting for Urban Scene Understanding</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Qilin</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0000-9064-1976</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhu</surname>
<given-names>Jinyu</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>Wysocki</surname>
<given-names>Olaf</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0016-0229</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Jutzi</surname>
<given-names>Boris</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Professorship of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Munich, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Munich, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Construction Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom</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>411</fpage>
<lpage>418</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Qilin Zhang 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-2-2026/411/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-411-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/411/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-411-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/411/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-411-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/411/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-411-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Combining visual semantics with language representations has made 3D interpretation more flexible and intuitive. Recent advances in Gaussian Splatting extend this to efficient 3D language fields supporting open-vocabulary queries. However, existing approaches show limited generalization in large urban scenes, especially for detailed building segmentation. Semantic 3D city models such as CityGML, by contrast, provide hierarchical and geometry-aligned structural semantics that complement appearance-driven visual cues. We introduce CityLangSplat, which integrates CityGML semantics into 3D Language Gaussian Splatting for urban environments. CityLangSplat rasterizes CityGML into pixel-aligned semantic maps, extracts vision-language features from SAM-derived segments and CityGML regions, and compresses both sources into a shared latent space via a lightweight autoencoder. 3D Gaussians are then optimized with a coverage-aware loss that balances accurate, building-focused CityGML supervision with broader SAM supervision, enabling geometry-aligned open-vocabulary reasoning in urban scenes. Experiments on TUM2TWIN and ZAHA datasets show consistent gains over LangSplat, with relative improvements of 22.9% in 2D and 15.1% in 3D evaluation while preserving real-time rendering. CityLangSplat provides a practical framework for combining semantic city models with language-embedded 3D Gaussian Splatting for geometry-aligned urban scene interpretation. Code will be released at https://github.com/zqlin0521/CityLangSplat.</p>
</abstract>
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