# UDGS-SLAM : UniDepth Assisted Gaussian Splatting for Monocular SLAM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.00362 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00362/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05830/) (2016)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [DNGaussian: Optimizing Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Radiance Fields with Global-Local Depth Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06912/) (2024)
- [BinsFormer: Revisiting Adaptive Bins for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00987/) (2022)
- [Point-SLAM: Dense Neural Point Cloud-based SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04278/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08493/) (2017)
- [Gaussian-SLAM: Photo-realistic Dense SLAM with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10070/) (2023)
- [NeW CRFs: Neural Window Fully-connected CRFs for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01502/) (2022)
- [Train in Germany, Test in The USA: Making 3D Object Detectors Generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08139/) (2020)
- [Vox-Fusion: Dense Tracking and Mapping with Voxel-based Neural Implicit Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15858/) (2022)
- [DN-Splatter: Depth and Normal Priors for Gaussian Splatting and Meshing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17822/) (2024)
- [P3Depth: Monocular Depth Estimation with a Piecewise Planarity Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02091/) (2022)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Scale-Aware Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17253/) (2023)
- [LocalBins: Improving Depth Estimation by Learning Local Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15132/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in monocular neural depth estimation, particularly those achieved by the UniDepth network, have prompted the investigation of integrating UniDepth within a Gaussian splatting framework for monocular SLAM. This study presents UDGS-SLAM, a novel approach that eliminates the necessity of RGB-D sensors for depth estimation within Gaussian splatting framework. UDGS-SLAM employs statistical filtering to ensure local consistency of the estimated depth and jointly optimizes camera trajectory and Gaussian scene representation parameters. The proposed method achieves high-fidelity rendered images and low ATERMSE of the camera trajectory. The performance of UDGS-SLAM is rigorously evaluated using the TUM RGB-D dataset and benchmarked against several baseline methods, demonstrating superior performance across various scenarios. Additionally, an ablation study is conducted to validate design choices and investigate the impact of different network backbone encoders on system performance.