Large-scale visual SLAM for in-the-wild videos

Accurate and robust 3D scene reconstruction from casual, in-the-wild videos can significantly simplify robot deployment to new environments. However, reliable camera pose estimation and scene reconstruction from such unconstrained videos remains an open challenge. Existing visual-only SLAM methods perform well on benchmark datasets but struggle with real-world footage which often exhibits uncontrolled motion including rapid rotations and pure forward movements, textureless regions, and dynamic objects. We analyze the limitations of current methods and introduce a robust pipeline designed to improve 3D reconstruction from casual videos. We build upon recent deep visual odometry methods but increase robustness in several ways. Camera intrinsics are automatically recovered from the first few frames using structure-from-motion. Dynamic objects and less-constrained areas are masked with a predictive model. Additionally, we leverage monocular depth estimates to regularize bundle adjustment, mitigating errors in low-parallax situations. Finally, we integrate place recognition and loop closure to reduce long-term drift and refine both intrinsics and pose estimates through global bundle adjustment. We demonstrate large-scale contiguous 3D models from several online videos in various environments. In contrast, baseline methods typically produce locally inconsistent results at several points, producing separate segments or distorted maps. In lieu of ground-truth pose data, we evaluate map consistency, execution time and visual accuracy of re-rendered NeRF models. Our proposed system establishes a new baseline for visual reconstruction from casual uncontrolled videos found online, demonstrating more consistent reconstructions over longer sequences of in-the-wild videos than previously achieved.