PGSR: Planar-based Gaussian Splatting for Efficient and High-Fidelity Surface Reconstruction

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has attracted widespread attention due to its high-quality rendering, and ultra-fast training and rendering speed. However, due to the unstructured and irregular nature of Gaussian point clouds, it is difficult to guarantee geometric reconstruction accuracy and multi-view consistency simply by relying on image reconstruction loss. Although many studies on surface reconstruction based on 3DGS have emerged recently, the quality of their meshes is generally unsatisfactory. To address this problem, we propose a fast planar-based Gaussian splatting reconstruction representation (PGSR) to achieve high-fidelity surface reconstruction while ensuring high-quality rendering. Specifically, we first introduce an unbiased depth rendering method, which directly renders the distance from the camera origin to the Gaussian plane and the corresponding normal map based on the Gaussian distribution of the point cloud, and divides the two to obtain the unbiased depth. We then introduce single-view geometric, multi-view photometric, and geometric regularization to preserve global geometric accuracy. We also propose a camera exposure compensation model to cope with scenes with large illumination variations. Experiments on indoor and outdoor scenes show that our method achieves fast training and rendering while maintaining high-fidelity rendering and geometric reconstruction, outperforming 3DGS-based and NeRF-based methods.

Depth Completion with Multiple Balanced Bases and Confidence for Dense Monocular SLAM

Dense SLAM based on monocular cameras does indeed have immense application value in the field of AR/VR, especially when it is performed on a mobile device. In this paper, we propose a novel method that integrates a light-weight depth completion network into a sparse SLAM system using a multi-basis depth representation, so that dense mapping can be performed online even on a mobile phone. Specifically, we present a specifically optimized multi-basis depth completion network, called BBC-Net, tailored to the characteristics of traditional sparse SLAM systems. BBC-Net can predict multiple balanced bases and a confidence map from a monocular image with sparse points generated by off-the-shelf keypoint-based SLAM systems. The final depth is a linear combination of predicted depth bases that can be optimized by tuning the corresponding weights. To seamlessly incorporate the weights into traditional SLAM optimization and ensure efficiency and robustness, we design a set of depth weight factors, which makes our network a versatile plug-in module, facilitating easy integration into various existing sparse SLAM systems and significantly enhancing global depth consistency through bundle adjustment. To verify the portability of our method, we integrate BBC-Net into two representative SLAM systems. The experimental results on various datasets show that the proposed method achieves better performance in monocular dense mapping than the state-of-the-art methods. We provide an online demo running on a mobile phone, which verifies the efficiency and mapping quality of the proposed method in real-world scenarios.

VIP-SLAM: An Efficient Tightly-Coupled RGB-D Visual Inertial Planar SLAM

In this paper, we propose a tightly-coupled SLAM system fused with RGB, Depth, IMU and structured plane information. Traditional sparse points based SLAM systems always maintain a mass of map points to model the environment. Huge number of map points bring us a high computational complexity, making it difficult to be deployed on mobile devices. On the other hand, planes are common structures in man-made environment especially in indoor environments. We usually can use a small number of planes to represent a large scene. So the main purpose of this article is to decrease the high complexity of sparse points based SLAM. We build a lightweight back-end map which consists of a few planes and map points to achieve efficient bundle adjustment (BA) with an equal or better accuracy. We use homography constraints to eliminate the parameters of numerous plane points in the optimization and reduce the complexity of BA. We separate the parameters and measurements in homography and point-to-plane constraints and compress the measurements part to further effectively improve the speed of BA. We also integrate the plane information into the whole system to realize robust planar feature extraction, data association, and global consistent planar reconstruction. Finally, we perform an ablation study and compare our method with similar methods in simulation and real environment data. Our system achieves obvious advantages in accuracy and efficiency. Even if the plane parameters are involved in the optimization, we effectively simplify the back-end map by using planar structures. The global bundle adjustment is nearly 2 times faster than the sparse points based SLAM algorithm.