Bridging visual and wireless sensing via a unified radiation field for 3D radio map construction
Abstract
The emerging applications of next-generation wireless networks demand high-fidelity environmental intelligence. 3D radio maps bridge physical environments and electromagnetic propagation for spectrum planning and environment-aware sensing. However, most existing methods treat visual and wireless data as independent modalities and fail to leverage shared electromagnetic propagation principles. To bridge this gap, we propose URF-GS , a unified radio-optical radiation field framework based on 3D Gaussian splatting and inverse rendering for 3D radio map construction. By fusing cross-modal observations, our method recovers scene geometry and material properties to predict radio signals under arbitrary transceiver configurations without retraining. Experiments demonstrate up to a 24.7% improvement in spatial spectrum accuracy and a 10 × increase in sample efficiency compared with NeRF-based methods. We further showcase URF-GS in Wi-Fi AP deployment and robot path planning tasks. This unified visual-wireless representation supports holistic radiation field modeling for future wireless communication systems.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Millimeter-Wave Propagation and Modeling
Indoor and Outdoor Localization Technologies
Precipitation Measurement and Analysis
Publication details
- Journal / source
- npj Wireless Technology
- Publisher
- Springer Science and Business Media LLC
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 1
- Publication date
- 6 August 2026
- Language
- EN