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FusionGS-SLAM: Multiple Sensors Fusion for Simultaneous Localization and Real-Time Photorealistic Mapping

Thanh-Danh Phan, Gon-Woo Kim

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Key figure (auto-extracted from paper)
FusionGS-SLAM enables robust, real-time photorealistic 3D mapping in challenging outdoor environments by tightly coupling visual, LiDAR, and inertial sensor data.
Visual-LiDAR-inertial fusion 3D Gaussian Splatting Real-time SLAM Photorealistic mapping Multi-sensor fusion Outdoor localization

Problem

Purely visual SLAM systems struggle with scale ambiguity and tracking instability in unbounded outdoor environments, while existing multi-sensor fusion methods for photorealistic mapping are either offline or too slow for real-time robotics applications.

Approach

The framework tightly fuses visual, LiDAR, and inertial data via factor graph optimization for robust odometry, then initializes and optimizes 3D Gaussian primitives using depth-invariant spherical projection and adaptive densification for real-time, high-fidelity rendering.

Key results

  • Tightly-coupled visual-LiDAR-inertial localization framework for robust outdoor tracking
  • Novel 3D Gaussian initialization via depth-invariant spherical projection fusing LiDAR geometry and visual features
  • Adaptive keyframing and sliding-window optimization ensuring real-time photorealistic mapping
  • Superior accuracy and rendering quality over state-of-the-art 3DGS SLAM on public and self-collected datasets

Why it matters

Provides a reliable, real-time mapping solution for autonomous robots and AR/VR systems operating in complex, unbounded outdoor environments where traditional SLAM fails.

Abstract

This work presents a FusionGS-SLAM, a robust framework for simultaneous localization and real-time photore- alistic mapping leveraging the power of sensor fusion techniques. To achieve this, the proposed method employs a tightly-coupled technique to effectively combine multiple factors from improved subsystems, thereby generating a robust odometry for the down- stream tasks. Moreover, a dense 3D Gaussian map is constructed by leveraging geometric information across sensor modalities, with real-time mapping strategies designed to enhance robustness and rendering quality in large-scale and challenging environments. Experimental evaluation of various challenging scenes, including the public and self-collected datasets, showcases the superior per- formance compared to the current state-of-the-art 3DGS SLAM.

Index terms

Mapping SLAM Localization

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