TAMBRIDGE: Bridging Frame-Centered Tracking and 3D Gaussian Splatting for Enhanced SLAM

TL;DR

TAMBRIDGE introduces a novel SLAM system that combines frame-centered tracking with 3D Gaussian Splatting, achieving real-time performance and robustness to noise and motion blur for robotic applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a new fusion bridge module that integrates visual odometry with 3D Gaussian Splatting, improving pose initialization and rendering convergence in large-scale scenes.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality and localization accuracy.

Demonstrates robustness against sensor noise and motion blur.

Enables real-time SLAM performance in complex environments.

Abstract

The limited robustness of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to motion blur and camera noise, along with its poor real-time performance, restricts its application in robotic SLAM tasks. Upon analysis, the primary causes of these issues are the density of views with motion blur and the cumulative errors in dense pose estimation from calculating losses based on noisy original images and rendering results, which increase the difficulty of 3DGS rendering convergence. Thus, a cutting-edge 3DGS-based SLAM system is introduced, leveraging the efficiency and flexibility of 3DGS to achieve real-time performance while remaining robust against sensor noise, motion blur, and the challenges posed by long-session SLAM. Central to this approach is the Fusion Bridge module, which seamlessly integrates tracking-centered ORB Visual Odometry with mapping-centered online 3DGS. Precise pose initialization is enabled by this module through joint optimization of re-projection and rendering loss, as well as strategic view selection, enhancing rendering convergence in large-scale scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art rendering quality and localization accuracy, positioning this system as a promising solution for real-world robotics applications that require stable, near-real-time performance. Our project is available at https://ZeldaFromHeaven.github.io/TAMBRIDGE/