HiCo-GS: Hierarchical Context Aggregation and Geometric Consistency for Octree Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

Octree-based anchor Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a scalable representation for city-scale novel view synthesis, where multi-level anchors adaptively capture scene content from coarse building structures to fine architectural details. However, we identify a fundamental limitation in existing methods: cross-level feature isolation, where each level's anchor features are optimized independently with no inter-level communication, causing color drift on building facades and over-smoothing in textured regions. We present HiCo-GS, a high-fidelity reconstruction framework with two complementary modules. Cross-Level Context Aggregation (CLCA) enables bidirectional hierarchical prior injection by leveraging the octree's spatial containment structure to aggregate per-level context vectors into parent-self-child triplets, fused via a lightweight MLP with residual connection. Coarse-level structural priors flow down to inform fine-level anchors, while fine-level detail statistics feed back to prevent over-smoothing, at negligible computational overhead. Depth-Normal Geometric Consistency (DNGC) regularization enforces agreement between rendered normals and depth-derived normals through an alpha-weighted consistency loss, complemented by edge-aware smoothness losses with progressive warmup that exploit the strong planar priors ubiquitous in urban geometry to suppress floating artifacts. We further introduce the China-Pagoda dataset comprising 8 ancient Chinese pagodas with over 1,200 images each, featuring dense ornamental carvings, curved multi-layer eaves, and repetitive fine-grained textures. Extensive experiments on Mill19, UrbanScene3D, MatrixCity, and China-Pagoda demonstrate that HiCo-GS achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality and substantially cleaner geometry across real-world and synthetic urban benchmarks.Code: https://github.com/WZ-CS/HiCo-GS.