This paper presents a robust, large-scale neural SLAM system featuring a multi-submap architecture and a dual-tier loop closure mechanism, and proposes a progressive mapping strategy that dynamically allocates neural submaps to maintain high-fidelity representations without memory explosion.
Abstract
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based SLAM has demonstrated impressive results in small-scale scene reconstruction, yet scaling these methods to extensive, complex environments remains challenging due to catastrophic forgetting and accumulated trajectory drift. This paper presents a robust, large-scale neural SLAM system featuring a multi-submap architecture and a dual-tier loop closure mechanism. Specifically, we propose a progressive mapping strategy that dynamically allocates neural submaps to maintain high-fidelity representations without memory explosion. For robust pose estimation, an optical-flow-based tracking module is integrated to handle aggressive motions. To address global consistency, we introduce a local-to-global loop closure framework leveraging the foundation model for high-performance global descriptor extraction, significantly enhancing relocalization accuracy under varying viewpoints. Furthermore, an inter-submap online distillation algorithm is designed during back-end optimization to enforce geometric and appearance consistency across overlapping submap boundaries. To validate the system, we developed a customized handheld mechatronic platform and conducted extensive evaluations on both public benchmarks and our large-scale indoor-outdoor datasets. Experimental results, including direct deployment on an onboard computing unit, demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art neural SLAM methods in reconstruction quality and localization robustness, providing a scalable solution for real-world robotic perception and digital twinning. We will release the code publicly on \href{https://github.com/dtc111111/MSN-SLAM}{https://github.com/dtc111111/MSN-SLAM} .
Existing Gaussian-splatting-based monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems are either tailored to short sequences, are not real-time, or suffer from prohibitive GPU memory requirements, limiting their applicability in realistic, long-horizon scenarios. To address this, we present GLAM-SLAM, a real-time, decoupled Gaussian-splatting SLAM system designed for large-scale outdoor scenes. We ensure lightweight tracking using a robust, feature-based SLAM frontend, while for mapping, we adopt a structured, sparse anchor grid representation that ensures scalable operation and maintains scene coherence across long-term sequences. To satisfy the dense initialization requirements of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), we introduce a geometry-based flow-densification anchoring strategy using epipolar constraints. Furthermore, by treating mapping as a multi-scene problem, we propose a scene-partitioning strategy that introduces a strong spatial inductive bias via MLP initializations to generate localized Gaussians. We evaluate our system on the challenging, long-sequence KITTI Odometry, Oxford RobotCar, and M'alaga datasets. Extensive ablations and comparisons demonstrate a 15% improvement in reconstruction quality over the second-best performer, while maintaining real-time performance and the ability to scale to longer sequences. Code is publicly available for the benefit of the community.
Recent geometric foundation models enable feed-forward inference for SLAM, but their predictions are strongly dependent on the input view set, which leads to geometric inconsistencies and trajectory drift when results are chained over long sequences. Online deployment further exposes a trade-off between the low latency of two-view tracking and the constraint richness of multi-view inference. We introduce UniSim-SLAM, an integrated system that runs lightweight two-view keyframe tracking in the frontend and performs periodic multi-view submap refinement in the backend. To combine predictions defined in heterogeneous local coordinates with inconsistent scales, we formulate a unified multi-level factor graph on $Sim(3)$ that jointly optimizes global keyframe poses and submap poses. The graph integrates temporal view-to-view odometry edges, view-to-submap bridge edges with depth-statistics scale anchoring, and submap-to-submap tie and scale constraints to enforce consistent similarity relations across submaps. Experiments on TUM RGB-D and 7-Scenes show that UniSim-SLAM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in the uncalibrated setting, reducing trajectory error by $38.5\% $ on TUM RGB-D and $45.9\%$ on 7-Scenes compared to prior best results. Project page: https://vision3d-lab.github.io/unisim-slam/
Inha Lee, Dongjae Jeong, Junhee Lee et al.· 0 citations
SLAM systems based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have recently demonstrated promising reconstruction accuracy for dense 3D scene representations. However, current 3DGS systems struggle to meet the strict demands of real-world deployments due to severe limitations in operational performance and map adaptability. To this end, we propose LightSplat, a hybrid-representation RGB-D SLAM framework. It synergizes local sparse features for robust and fast tracking with a dual-thread backend that progressively constructs dense Gaussian submaps. Crucially, we enable online loop closure through feature-accelerated 3DGS registration, refining overall map consistency through pose graph optimization. Ultimately, LightSplat achieves the online reconstruction of high-fidelity Gaussian map. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and real-world robotic platform demonstrate that our method achieves near state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and the capability to accommodate practical camera motions, maintaining an average framerate of 8 FPS. Overall, LightSplat provides an efficient and robust foundation for deploying high-fidelity 3DGS in real-world environments.
Jun-Ze Bao, Ye Gao, Yi-Ming Huang et al.· 0 citations
Single-UAV dense visual SLAM is often limited by long trajectory accumulation, incomplete local observations, redundant map growth, and onboard computation constraints. Collaborative mapping can distribute a large mission across several local submaps, but dense 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) maps are expensive to exchange and individual Gaussian primitives are not reliable cross-agent matching units. This paper proposes G3M-SLAM, an anchor-guided Gaussian memory framework for UAV-oriented dense SLAM with representation-level submap fusion. Stable geometric anchors organize local Gaussian primitives and form a compact structural interface for submap exchange, overlap recognition, and correction. A hybrid feature-render tracking strategy combines sparse geometric constraints with Gaussian rendering residuals. A generative completion module predicts candidate Gaussians in weakly observed regions, while multi-view geometric verification and an evidence-aware lifecycle mechanism reject unsupported candidates and control redundant map growth. A dual-graph loop bundle adjustment couples the camera pose graph and the anchor memory graph so that corrections can be propagated to anchor-associated Gaussian structures. Experiments on Replica, ScanNet, TUM RGB-D, and EuRoC MAV evaluate local tracking, dense rendering, runtime, and a split-agent fusion protocol. In the latter protocol, fusion reduces ATE from 0.045 m to 0.031 m, translational RPE from 0.030 m to 0.017 m, and rotational RPE from 1.56° to 0.93°. The serialized anchor packet is 0.66 MB, approximately 101.2× smaller than the complete Gaussian submap. On Jetson AGX Orin, the full system processes EuRoC V101 and V103 at 1.49 FPS and 1.42 FPS, respectively, while ATE increases by only 0.001 m relative to the RTX 3090 Ti workstation results. These gains represent recovery from split-agent degradation and compact representation exchange rather than an improvement over full-sequence single-agent processing. The present study therefore evaluates a representation-level fusion interface and does not reproduce the full conditions of a field-deployed decentralized multi-UAV system.
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) enables dense, continuous scene reconstruction. However, existing systems operating with limited online resources struggle to simultaneously construct two types of constraints, namely, compact yet discriminative spatial constraints derived from scene representations and persistent temporal constraints derived from historical observations. To address this challenge, we propose CHOW-SLAM, a dense RGB-D SLAM framework that explicitly constructs these complementary spatial and temporal constraints. Spatially, we propose a compact parametric-hash (P-H) hybrid representation that organizes components based on planes and grids across scales in P and H branches. A unified multi-output decoder further aligns the ray termination distributions induced by TSDF and density, preserving geometry and appearance under a compact parameter budget. Temporally, we propose a complementary overlap-window strategy to prevent optimization from being dominated by short-term overlap or weakly related historical observations. Within a fixed budget, the strategy retains recent frames, selects high-overlap local frames, and introduces temporally distributed historical keyframes. Loss-aware keyframe insertion and bundle adjustment scheduling further adapt optimization to tracking quality. In addition, ORB-based tracking and geometric pose estimation are used for pose initialization, followed by neural rendering optimization to improve tracking stability. Extensive evaluations on multiple datasets demonstrate that CHOW-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both scene reconstruction quality and camera tracking accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/jinjidexiaohuoban/CHOW-SLAM.
Wenxuan Ji, Jin Xiao, Xiaoguang Hu et al.· 0 citations
This work introduces a system that combines the strong sequential constraints of SLAM with the flexibility and global optimization of offline SfM, enabling the metric reconstruction of arbitrary, long, uncalibrated videos.
Zador Pataki, Paul-Edouard Sarlin, Marc Pollefeys· arXiv.org· 0 citations
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