Implicit neural representation and explicit 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) for novel view synthesis have achieved remarkable progress with frame-based camera (e.g. RGB and RGB-D cameras) recently. Compared to frame-based camera, a novel type of bio-inspired visual sensor, i.e. event camera, has demonstrated advantages in high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, low power consumption, and low latency, which make it favored for many robotic applications. In this work, we present IncEventGS, an incremental 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction algorithm with a single event camera, without the assumption of known camera poses. To recover the 3D scene representation incrementally, we exploit the tracking and mapping paradigm of conventional SLAM pipelines for IncEventGS. Given the incoming event stream, the tracker first estimates an initial camera motion based on prior reconstructed 3D-GS scene representation. The mapper then jointly refines both the 3D scene representation and camera motion based on the previously estimated motion trajectory from the tracker. The experimental results demonstrate that IncEventGS delivers superior performance compared to prior NeRF-based methods and other related baselines, even if we do not have the ground-truth camera poses. Furthermore, our method can also deliver better performance compared to state-of-the-art event visual odometry methods in terms of camera motion estimation.

[1] Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) helps robots estimate their poses and perceive the environment in unknown settings. Recent work has demonstrated that implicit neural radiance fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offer higher fidelity scene representation than traditional map representations. We propose VSS-SLAM, which utilizes voxelized surfels as the map representation for incremental mapping in unknown environments. This representation effectively addresses the issue of redundant and disordered primitives encountered in previous methods, thereby enhancing geometric accuracy during reconstruction. Specifically, our approach divides the scene using voxels and stores geometric and appearance information in feature vectors at the voxel vertices. Before rendering, these feature vectors are decoded to generate the corresponding surfels. Additionally, we align camera poses through image and depth rendering. Extensive experiments on the Replica and TUM-RGBD datasets demonstrate that VSS-SLAM delivers high-fidelity reconstruction and accurate pose estimation in both simulated and real-world environments. Source code will soon be available.

Recent advancements in neural implicit fields for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) have provided breakthroughs. However, the benefits of reconstruction results to the perception ability of robot are minimal. Therefore, we propose FI-SLAM, a dense semantic instance SLAM system based on neural implicit representation, which significantly aids robots in better understanding the scene. FI-SLAM employs a coordinate and plane joint encoding method, which reduces the difficulty of feature storage by flattening the feature space. Furthermore, to improve representation efficiency, we use the method of adjacent feature level linear interpolation to describe features. We propose a feature fusion (FF) method to merge the object features with the scene features. The fused feature vector enhances the reconstruction accuracy of the local scene while ensuring the global reconstruction effect. It has improved the global reconstruction effect of the scene and the accuracy of camera tracking. Numerous experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method can assure accurate tracking precision, high-fidelity reconstruction results, and complete semantic instance maps. In summary, the algorithm we proposed heavily augments the scene perception capabilities of robot.