# NeRF-VO: Real-Time Sparse Visual Odometry with Neural Radiance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.13471 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13471/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [NICE-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scalable Encoding for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12130/) (2021)
- [Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02565/) (2016)
- [iMAP: Implicit Mapping and Positioning in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12352/) (2021)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [D3VO: Deep Depth, Deep Pose and Deep Uncertainty for Monocular Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01060/) (2020)
- [DeMoN: Depth and Motion Network for Learning Monocular Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02401/) (2016)
- [Deep Patch Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04726/) (2022)
- [NeRF-SLAM: Real-Time Dense Monocular SLAM with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13641/) (2022)
- [Co-SLAM: Joint Coordinate and Sparse Parametric Encodings for Neural Real-Time SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14377/) (2023)
- [NICER-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scene Encoding for RGB SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03594/) (2023)
- [Point-SLAM: Dense Neural Point Cloud-based SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04278/) (2023)
- [CNN-SLAM: Real-time dense monocular SLAM with learned depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03489/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [How NeRFs and 3D Gaussian Splatting are Reshaping SLAM: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13255/) (2024)
- [Splat-SLAM: Globally Optimized RGB-only SLAM with 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16544/) (2024)
- [GlORIE-SLAM: Globally Optimized RGB-only Implicit Encoding Point Cloud SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19549/) (2024)
- [DVLO: Deep Visual-LiDAR Odometry with Local-to-Global Feature Fusion and Bi-Directional Structure Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18274/) (2024)
- [Scene-agnostic Pose Regression for Visual Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19543/) (2025)
- [RIDERS: Radar-Infrared Depth Estimation for Robust Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02067/) (2024)
- [MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16474/) (2026)
- [XRDSLAM: A Flexible and Modular Framework for Deep Learning based SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23690/) (2024)
- [LiLMaps: Learnable Implicit Language Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03304/) (2025)
- [Learning to Anchor Visual Odometry: KAN-Based Pose Regression for Planetary Landing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06968/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce a novel monocular visual odometry (VO) system, NeRF-VO, that integrates learning-based sparse visual odometry for low-latency camera tracking and a neural radiance scene representation for fine-detailed dense reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Our system initializes camera poses using sparse visual odometry and obtains view-dependent dense geometry priors from a monocular prediction network. We harmonize the scale of poses and dense geometry, treating them as supervisory cues to train a neural implicit scene representation. NeRF-VO demonstrates exceptional performance in both photometric and geometric fidelity of the scene representation by jointly optimizing a sliding window of keyframed poses and the underlying dense geometry, which is accomplished through training the radiance field with volume rendering. We surpass SOTA methods in pose estimation accuracy, novel view synthesis fidelity, and dense reconstruction quality across a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets while achieving a higher camera tracking frequency and consuming less GPU memory.