Uncertainty Estimation for Deep Reconstruction in Actuatic Disaster Scenarios with Autonomous Vehicles

Informative Path Planning for scalar field reconstruction uses predictive uncertainty to direct sensing vehicles toward maximally informative locations. Gaussian Processes provide this signal but their stationary isotropic kernels are misspecified for non-homogeneous phenomena such as oil spills, producing miscalibrated estimates that degrade planning. We investigate whether replacing the Gaussian Process with a well-calibrated Deep Ensemble improves path planning outcomes, and whether uncertainty quality interacts with the choice of planning algorithm. Five strategies ($ε$-Greedy, Value Greedy, Uncertainty Greedy, Monte Carlo Tree Search, and Receding Horizon Orienteering) share a common Deep Ensemble backbone trained on physics-based oil spill simulations. On held-out stochastic spill scenarios, the Deep Ensemble reduces normalised reconstruction error by $83\%$ relative to the Gaussian Process baseline. Crucially, well-calibrated uncertainty amplifies the importance of the planning strategy: the performance gap between algorithms is negligible under miscalibrated models but becomes substantial under the ensemble, where multi-step lookahead planners outperform greedy selection by up to $32\%$ in reconstruction error and achieve IoU above $0.85$. Monte Carlo Tree Search is the recommended planner, matching Orienteering in reconstruction quality at an order-of-magnitude lower computational cost.

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting have enabled impressive photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, to transition from a pure rendering engine to a reliable spatial map for autonomous agents and safety-critical applications, knowing where the representation is uncertain is as important as the rendering fidelity itself. We bridge this critical gap by introducing a lightweight, plug-and-play framework for pixel-wise, view-dependent predictive uncertainty estimation. Our post-hoc method formulates uncertainty as a Bayesian-regularized linear least-squares optimization over reconstruction residuals. This architecture-agnostic approach extracts a per-primitive uncertainty channel without modifying the underlying scene representation or degrading baseline visual fidelity. Crucially, we demonstrate that providing this actionable reliability signal successfully translates 3D Gaussian splatting into a trustworthy spatial map, further improving state-of-the-art performance across three critical downstream perception tasks: active view selection, pose-agnostic scene change detection, and pose-agnostic anomaly detection.

We present DynActiveGS, a dynamic-aware active reconstruction framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for autonomous exploration in dynamic environments. The framework incrementally reconstructs a 3D Gaussian scene representation while suppressing motion-corrupted observations through online uncertainty prediction and uncertainty-weighted Gaussian optimization. A key component of DynActiveGS is the explicit decomposition of uncertainty into structural uncertainty and motion-induced uncertainty, which enables the system to distinguish under-reconstructed static regions from dynamically unreliable areas. Based on these uncertainty fields, DynActiveGS performs dynamic-aware viewpoint selection and dynamic-constrained path planning to favor informative yet stable observations during exploration. The resulting system forms a unified closed-loop pipeline for robust active reconstruction in dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments on challenging dynamic benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over existing active reconstruction baselines in reconstruction accuracy, completeness, rendering quality, and exploration efficiency.