PropSplat: Map-Free RF Field Reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Propagation Splatting
Authors: William Bjorndahl, Maninder Pal Singh, Farhad Nouri, Joseph Camp
Organizations: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, USA · Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA
Abstract
Building a site-specific propagation model typically requires either ray-tracing over detailed 3D maps or dense measurement campaigns. Both approaches are expensive and often infeasible for rapid deployments where geographic data is unavailable or outdated. We present PropSplat, a map-free propagation modeling method that reconstructs radio frequency (RF) fields using 3D anisotropic Gaussian primitives. Each Gaussian encodes a scalar path loss offset relative to an explicit baseline path loss model with a learnable path loss exponent. Gaussians are initialized along observed transmitter--receiver paths and optimized end-to-end to learn the propagation environment without external information like floor plans, terrain databases, or clutter data. We evaluate PropSplat against wireless radiance field methods NeRF2, GSRF, and WRF-GS+ on two real-world datasets. On large-scale outdoor drive-tests spanning multiple topographical regions at six sub-6 GHz frequencies, PropSplat achieves 5.38 dB RMSE when training measurements are spaced 300m apart and outperforms WRF-GS+ (5.87 dB), GSRF (7.46 dB), and NeRF2 (14.76 dB). On indoor Bluetooth Low Energy measurements, PropSplat achieves 0.19m mean localization error, an order of magnitude better than NeRF2 (1.84m), while achieving near-identical received signal strength prediction accuracy. These results show that accurate site-specific propagation reconstruction is achievable from sparse RF-native measurements. The need for geographic data as a prerequisite for scalable RF environment modeling is reduced.
High-fidelity radio fields are typically simulated for every scene--transmitter configuration or fitted separately to each scene, failing to exploit propagation structures shared across environments. We present Point2Radio, a foundation model that learns a transferable propagation prior from multiple environments. Given a material-aware point cloud and a transmitter (TX) setting, a common encoder produces a TX-conditioned scene representation that can be queried at arbitrary receiver (RX) locations. Task-specific query decoders map this representation to different radio quantities, e.g., three-dimensional (3D) path-gain (PG) fields and power angular spectra (PAS). At inference for a new scene, the model uses only a material-aware point cloud and transceiver queries, running in milliseconds on a single GPU without meshes or explicit path tracing. We evaluate PG prediction on a scene-disjoint split of a 337-scene corpus containing 86,272 TX-conditioned fields. Point2Radio achieves 0.871 dB mean absolute error (MAE), reducing error by 76.7% relative to a same-split UNet-style baseline. The same encoder also supports PAS prediction via a task-specific decoder. Experiments further show that light target-scene fine-tuning improves adaptation to a specific environment.
Wireless radiance field (WRF) reconstruction aims to learn a continuous, queryable representation of radio frequency characteristics over 3D space and direction, from which specific quantities, such as the spatial power spectrum (SPS) at a receiver given a transmitter position, can be predicted. While Gaussian splatting (GS)-based method has surpassed Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based method for this task, existing adaptations largely transplant vision pipelines, limiting physical interpretability and accuracy. We introduce BiSplat-WRF, a planar GS framework that retains the expressiveness of 3D GS while removing unnecessary projections and incorporating global EM coupling and mutual scattering among primitives. Each primitive is a 2D planar Gaussian with 3D coordinates, rendered directly on the angular domain of the SPS. A bilinear spatial transformer (BST) aggregates inter-primitive relations on an angular grid and, via attention, captures long-range electromagnetic dependencies, thereby enforcing globally aware EM interactions that reflect the complex physics of the wireless environment. On spatial spectrum synthesis task, BiSplat-WRF surpasses NeRF-based and prior GS-based baselines with respect to the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM); comprehensive ablation studies validate the contribution of BST. We also provide a larger BiSplat-WRF+ variant that further increases SSIM at a higher computation cost, serving as a strong reference for future studies.
Explicit neural representations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enable high-fidelity and real-time novel view synthesis, yet optimize for alpha-composited optical appearance rather than ray-intersectable geometry. In contrast, radio-frequency (RF) digital twins require deterministic multi-bounce paths, where the geometry dictates trajectories and their associated attenuation and delay. We introduce a framework enabling differentiable RF propagation simulation directly within visually reconstructed neural scenes, allowing point-to-point path computation between arbitrary 3D locations while preserving high-quality visual rendering. Unlike conventional RF simulation pipelines that rely on manually constructed meshes, we embed Gaussian primitives into a hardware-accelerated ray tracing structure as the underlying spatial representation. By extracting physically meaningful channel impulse responses from visual-only reconstructions, we provide cross-modal evidence that neural reconstructions can serve as unified spatial representations for both electromagnetic propagation simulation and photorealistic view synthesis.