# CubemapSLAM: A Piecewise-Pinhole Monocular Fisheye SLAM System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.12633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12633/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Review on Panoramic Imaging and Its Applications in Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05570/) (2022)
- [Depth Any Camera: Zero-Shot Metric Depth Estimation from Any Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02464/) (2025)
- [M2DGR: A Multi-sensor and Multi-scenario SLAM Dataset for Ground Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13659/) (2021)
- [LF-VIO: A Visual-Inertial-Odometry Framework for Large Field-of-View Cameras with Negative Plane](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12613/) (2022)
- [LF-VISLAM: A SLAM Framework for Large Field-of-View Cameras with Negative Imaging Plane on Mobile Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05167/) (2022)
- [Panoramic annular SLAM with loop closure and global optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13400/) (2021)
- [3D reconstruction from spherical images: A review of techniques, applications, and prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04495/) (2023)
- [3D Reconstruction of Spherical Images based on Incremental Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12770/) (2023)
- [Global-Aware Monocular Semantic Scene Completion with State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06569/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Camera Choice: An Empirical Study on Fisheye Camera Properties in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02139/) (2026)
- [Deformable Convolution Based Road Scene Semantic Segmentation of Fisheye Images in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16647/) (2024)
- [RayTun3R: Online Camera Adaptation in 3D Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02711/) (2026)
- [Look Up and Look Back: Hidden Attention and Latent Orientation in a Frozen Foundation Model for Panoramic SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00925/) (2026)
- [Fisheye Lens Camera based Autonomous Valet Parking System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13119/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a real-time feature-based SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) system for fisheye cameras featured by a large field-of-view (FoV). Large FoV cameras are beneficial for large-scale outdoor SLAM applications, because they increase visual overlap between consecutive frames and capture more pixels belonging to the static parts of the environment. However, current feature-based SLAM systems such as PTAM and ORB-SLAM limit their camera model to pinhole only. To compensate for the vacancy, we propose a novel SLAM system with the cubemap model that utilizes the full FoV without introducing distortion from the fisheye lens, which greatly benefits the feature matching pipeline. In the initialization and point triangulation stages, we adopt a unified vector-based representation to efficiently handle matches across multiple faces, and based on this representation we propose and analyze a novel inlier checking metric. In the optimization stage, we design and test a novel multi-pinhole reprojection error metric that outperforms other metrics by a large margin. We evaluate our system comprehensively on a public dataset as well as a self-collected dataset that contains real-world challenging sequences. The results suggest that our system is more robust and accurate than other feature-based fisheye SLAM approaches. The CubemapSLAM system has been released into the public domain.