Jointly estimating camera poses and mapping scenes from RGBD images is a fundamental task in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). State-of-the-art methods employ 3D Gaussians to represent a scene, and render these Gaussians through splatting for higher efficiency and better rendering. However, these methods cannot scale up to extremely large scenes, due to the inefficient tracking and mapping strategies that need to optimize all 3D Gaussians in the limited GPU memories throughout the training to maintain the geometry and color consistency to previous RGBD observations. To resolve this issue, we propose novel tracking and mapping strategies to work with a novel 3D representation, dubbed view-tied 3D Gaussians, for RGBD SLAM systems. View-tied 3D Gaussians is a kind of simplified Gaussians, which is tied to depth pixels, without needing to learn locations, rotations, and multi-dimensional variances. Tying Gaussians to views not only significantly saves storage but also allows us to employ many more Gaussians to represent local details in the limited GPU memory. Moreover, our strategies remove the need of maintaining all Gaussians learnable throughout the training, while improving rendering quality, and tracking accuracy. We justify the effectiveness of these designs, and report better performance over the latest methods on the widely used benchmarks in terms of rendering and tracking accuracy and scalability. Please see our project page for code and videos at https://machineperceptionlab.github.io/VTGaussian-SLAM-Project.

Learning neural implicit representations has achieved remarkable performance in 3D reconstruction from multi-view images. Current methods use volume rendering to render implicit representations into either RGB or depth images that are supervised by the multi-view ground truth. However, rendering a view each time suffers from incomplete depth at holes and unawareness of occluded structures from the depth supervision, which severely affects the accuracy of geometry inference via volume rendering. To resolve this issue, we propose to learn neural implicit representations from multi-view RGBD images through volume rendering with an attentive depth fusion prior. Our prior allows neural networks to sense coarse 3D structures from the Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF) fused from all available depth images for rendering. The TSDF enables accessing the missing depth at holes on one depth image and the occluded parts that are invisible from the current view. By introducing a novel attention mechanism, we allow neural networks to directly use the depth fusion prior with the inferred occupancy as the learned implicit function. Our attention mechanism works with either a one-time fused TSDF that represents a whole scene or an incrementally fused TSDF that represents a partial scene in the context of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Our evaluations on widely used benchmarks including synthetic and real-world scans show our superiority over the latest neural implicit methods.