From Flight to Insight: Semantic 3D Reconstruction for Aerial Inspection via Gaussian Splatting and Language-Guided Segmentation

Abstract

High-fidelity 3D reconstruction is critical for aerial inspection tasks such as infrastructure monitoring, structural assessment, and environmental surveying. While traditional photogrammetry techniques enable geometric modeling, they lack semantic interpretability, limiting their effectiveness for automated inspection workflows. Recent advances in neural rendering and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offer efficient, photorealistic reconstructions but similarly lack scene-level understanding. In this work, we present a UAV-based pipeline that extends Feature-3DGS for language-guided 3D segmentation. We leverage LSeg-based feature fields with CLIP embeddings to generate heatmaps in response to language prompts. These are thresholded to produce rough segmentations, and the highest-scoring point is then used as a prompt to SAM or SAM2 for refined 2D segmentation on novel view renderings. Our results highlight the strengths and limitations of various feature field backbones (CLIP-LSeg, SAM, SAM2) in capturing meaningful structure in large-scale outdoor environments. We demonstrate that this hybrid approach enables flexible, language-driven interaction with photorealistic 3D reconstructions, opening new possibilities for semantic aerial inspection and scene understanding.