LST-SLAM: A Stereo Thermal SLAM System for Kilometer-Scale Dynamic Environments

TL;DR

LST-SLAM is a novel stereo thermal SLAM system designed for large-scale dynamic environments, combining self-supervised learning, hybrid constraints, and global optimization to improve robustness and accuracy in challenging outdoor scenes.

Contribution

The paper introduces LST-SLAM, integrating thermal feature learning, hybrid constraints, and an online loop closure method for enhanced large-scale thermal SLAM performance.

Findings

Outperforms recent SLAM systems like AirSLAM and DROID-SLAM

Achieves robust localization in kilometer-scale dynamic scenes

Demonstrates significant accuracy improvements in experiments

Abstract

Thermal cameras offer strong potential for robot perception under challenging illumination and weather conditions. However, thermal Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains difficult due to unreliable feature extraction, unstable motion tracking, and inconsistent global pose and map construction, particularly in dynamic large-scale outdoor environments. To address these challenges, we propose LST-SLAM, a novel large-scale stereo thermal SLAM system that achieves robust performance in complex, dynamic scenes. Our approach combines self-supervised thermal feature learning, stereo dual-level motion tracking, and geometric pose optimization. We also introduce a semantic-geometric hybrid constraint that suppresses potentially dynamic features lacking strong inter-frame geometric consistency. Furthermore, we develop an online incremental bag-of-words model for loop closure detection, coupled with global pose optimization to mitigate accumulated drift. Extensive experiments on kilometer-scale dynamic thermal datasets show that LST-SLAM significantly outperforms recent representative SLAM systems, including AirSLAM and DROID-SLAM, in both robustness and accuracy.