IG-SLAM: Instant Gaussian SLAM
This work addresses 3D reconstruction for robotics or AR/VR applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SLAM and Gaussian Splatting techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of dense RGB-only SLAM by integrating Gaussian Splatting with robust tracking methods, achieving competitive performance with state-of-the-art systems and operating at 10 fps.
3D Gaussian Splatting has recently shown promising results as an alternative scene representation in SLAM systems to neural implicit representations. However, current methods either lack dense depth maps to supervise the mapping process or detailed training designs that consider the scale of the environment. To address these drawbacks, we present IG-SLAM, a dense RGB-only SLAM system that employs robust Dense-SLAM methods for tracking and combines them with Gaussian Splatting. A 3D map of the environment is constructed using accurate pose and dense depth provided by tracking. Additionally, we utilize depth uncertainty in map optimization to improve 3D reconstruction. Our decay strategy in map optimization enhances convergence and allows the system to run at 10 fps in a single process. We demonstrate competitive performance with state-of-the-art RGB-only SLAM systems while achieving faster operation speeds. We present our experiments on the Replica, TUM-RGBD, ScanNet, and EuRoC datasets. The system achieves photo-realistic 3D reconstruction in large-scale sequences, particularly in the EuRoC dataset.