# EndoFlow-SLAM: Real-Time Endoscopic SLAM with Flow-Constrained Gaussian Splatting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21420 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21420/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [NICE-SLAM: Neural Implicit Scalable Encoding for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12130/) (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)
- [ESLAM: Efficient Dense SLAM System Based on Hybrid Representation of Signed Distance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11704/) (2022)
- [Neural Rendering for Stereo 3D Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15255/) (2022)
- [GaussianFlow: Splatting Gaussian Dynamics for 4D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12365/) (2024)
- [Endo-Depth-and-Motion: Reconstruction and Tracking in Endoscopic Videos using Depth Networks and Photometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16525/) (2021)
- [Colonoscopy 3D Video Dataset with Paired Depth from 2D-3D Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08903/) (2022)
- [Learning How To Robustly Estimate Camera Pose in Endoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08023/) (2023)
- [EndoGSLAM: Real-Time Dense Reconstruction and Tracking in Endoscopic Surgeries using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15124/) (2024)
- [SAGE: SLAM with Appearance and Geometry Prior for Endoscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09487/) (2022)
- [Free-SurGS: SfM-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting for Surgical Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02918/) (2024)
- [PG-SLAM: Photo-realistic and Geometry-aware RGB-D SLAM in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15800/) (2024)
- [Direct and Sparse Deformable Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07370/) (2021)
- [ULSR-GS: Ultra Large-scale Surface Reconstruction Gaussian Splatting with Multi-View Geometric Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01402/) (2024)
- [DynSUP: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting from An Unposed Image Pair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00851/) (2024)

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

- [EndoWave: 4D Gaussian Splatting with Rational Wavelet for Endoscopic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23087/) (2025)
- [DentalSplat: Dental Occlusion Novel View Synthesis from Sparse Intra-Oral Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03099/) (2025)
- [BREATH-VL: Vision-Language-Guided 6-DoF Bronchoscopy Localization via Semantic-Geometric Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03713/) (2026)
- [NRGS-SLAM: Monocular Non-Rigid SLAM for Endoscopy via Deformation-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17182/) (2026)
- [4D Monocular Surgical Reconstruction under Arbitrary Camera Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17473/) (2026)
- [Dental3R: Geometry-Aware Pairing for Intraoral 3D Reconstruction from Sparse-View Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14315/) (2025)
- [Track2Map: Online Deformable SLAM with Motion-Aware Pose Optimization in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08408/) (2026)
- [ExtraGS: Enhancing Endoscopic View Extrapolation via Diffusion-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12785/) (2026)
- [EndoMD-SLAM: Endoscopic Gaussian Splatting SLAM under Optical Degradation with Memory and Static-Transient Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08949/) (2026)
- [Endo-TSR: Temporal Spectral Modeling of Appearance and Motion for Endoscopic Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32399/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficient three-dimensional reconstruction and real-time visualization are critical in surgical scenarios such as endoscopy. In recent years, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated remarkable performance in efficient 3D reconstruction and rendering. Most 3DGS-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods only rely on the appearance constraints for optimizing both 3DGS and camera poses. However, in endoscopic scenarios, the challenges include photometric inconsistencies caused by non-Lambertian surfaces and dynamic motion from breathing affects the performance of SLAM systems. To address these issues, we additionally introduce optical flow loss as a geometric constraint, which effectively constrains both the 3D structure of the scene and the camera motion. Furthermore, we propose a depth regularisation strategy to mitigate the problem of photometric inconsistencies and ensure the validity of 3DGS depth rendering in endoscopic scenes. In addition, to improve scene representation in the SLAM system, we improve the 3DGS refinement strategy by focusing on viewpoints corresponding to Keyframes with suboptimal rendering quality frames, achieving better rendering results. Extensive experiments on the C3VD static dataset and the StereoMIS dynamic dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in novel view synthesis and pose estimation, exhibiting high performance in both static and dynamic surgical scenes.