# SEGS-SLAM: Structure-enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM with Appearance Embedding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05242 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05242/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [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)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Scaffold-GS: Structured 3D Gaussians for View-Adaptive Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00109/) (2023)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [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)
- [SplaTAM: Splat, Track & Map 3D Gaussians for Dense RGB-D SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02126/) (2023)
- [GS-SLAM: Dense Visual SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11700/) (2023)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [Deep Patch Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04726/) (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)
- [ESLAM: Efficient Dense SLAM System Based on Hybrid Representation of Signed Distance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11704/) (2022)
- [Gaussian-SLAM: Photo-realistic Dense SLAM with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10070/) (2023)
- [CodeSLAM - Learning a Compact, Optimisable Representation for Dense Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00874/) (2018)
- [Vox-Fusion: Dense Tracking and Mapping with Voxel-based Neural Implicit Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15858/) (2022)
- [Photo-SLAM: Real-time Simultaneous Localization and Photorealistic Mapping for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16728/) (2023)
- [GO-SLAM: Global Optimization for Consistent 3D Instant Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02436/) (2023)
- [Neural Rerendering in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04290/) (2019)
- [FreGS: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Frequency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06908/) (2024)
- [SGS-SLAM: Semantic Gaussian Splatting For Neural Dense SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03246/) (2024)
- [Orbeez-SLAM: A Real-time Monocular Visual SLAM with ORB Features and NeRF-realized Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13274/) (2022)
- [SNI-SLAM: Semantic Neural Implicit SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11016/) (2023)
- [RGBD GS-ICP SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12550/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09977/) (2025)
- [ARTDECO: Towards Efficient and High-Fidelity On-the-Fly 3D Reconstruction with Structured Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08551/) (2025)
- [DINO-SLAM: DINO-informed RGB-D SLAM for Neural Implicit and Explicit Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19474/) (2025)
- [3D-UIR: 3D Gaussian for Underwater 3D Scene Reconstruction via Physics Based Appearance-Medium Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21238/) (2025)
- [UniGS: Unified Geometry-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Multimodal Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12174/) (2025)
- [Towards Next-Generation SLAM: A Survey on 3DGS-SLAM Focusing on Performance, Robustness, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04251/) (2026)
- [Spectral Defense Against Resource-Targeting Attack in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12796/) (2026)
- [X-GS: An Extensible Framework for Perceiving and Thinking with 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09632/) (2026)
- [A Survey of Spatial Memory Representations for Efficient Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16482/) (2026)
- [DGSG-Mind: Dynamic 3D Gaussian Scene Graphs for Long-Term Scene Understanding and Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29879/) (2026)
- [GLAM-SLAM: Real-time Gaussian Large-scale Mapping via Flow Densification and Spatial Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21416/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D Gaussian splatting (3D-GS) has recently revolutionized novel view synthesis in the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. However, most existing algorithms fail to fully capture the underlying structure, resulting in structural inconsistency. Additionally, they struggle with abrupt appearance variations, leading to inconsistent visual quality. To address these problems, we propose SEGS-SLAM, a structure-enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM, which achieves high-quality photorealistic mapping. Our main contributions are two-fold. First, we propose a structure-enhanced photorealistic mapping (SEPM) framework that, for the first time, leverages highly structured point cloud to initialize structured 3D Gaussians, leading to significant improvements in rendering quality. Second, we propose Appearance-from-Motion embedding (AfME), enabling 3D Gaussians to better model image appearance variations across different camera poses. Extensive experiments on monocular, stereo, and RGB-D datasets demonstrate that SEGS-SLAM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in photorealistic mapping quality, e.g., an improvement of 19.86% in PSNR over MonoGS on the TUM RGB-D dataset for monocular cameras. The project page is available at https://segs-slam.github.io/.