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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-2-2026-69-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Hierarchical Gaussian Partitioning for Semantic Segmentation of Airborne LiDAR Scenes</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Bendjilali</surname>
<given-names>Moussa</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Luminari</surname>
<given-names>Nicola</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>Alliez</surname>
<given-names>Pierre</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Alteia, France</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Inria Sophia-Antipolis, France</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>69</fpage>
<lpage>76</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Moussa Bendjilali 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-2-2026/69/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-69-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/69/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-69-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/69/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-69-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-2-2026/69/2026/isprs-annals-XI-2-2026-69-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>In this paper, we present a novel approach for semantic segmentation of airborne LiDAR point clouds that integrates a hierarchical Gaussian Mixture Model (hGMM) within the Superpoint Transformer (SPT) framework. The hGMM constructs a coarse-to-fine representation of the scene by recursively fitting Gaussian components to spatially coherent subsets of the point cloud, resulting in a hierarchical and structured decomposition that serves as a structured token set for the segmentation objective. While Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) can virtually fit any distribution, we constrain their use to structured suburban scenes, where their parametric form is naturally suited to represent planar and ellipsoidal geometries, hence allowing parsimonious mixtures. Experimental results on the DALES benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance with respect to state-of-the-art approaches, with notable improvements on classes such as ground and buildings. Results on indoor S3DIS confirm the method&amp;rsquo;s intended specificity to outdoor environments. These findings validate hGMM as a principled and effective alternative to heuristic partitioning techniques, integrating stochastic modelling with transformer-based semantic reasoning in large-scale 3D environments.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="8"/></counts>
</article-meta>
</front>
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