ODGS-SLAM: Omnidirectional Gaussian Splatting SLAM

This work presents ODGS-SLAM, an omnidirectional simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system utilizing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as the unified representation for tracking and mapping.Thus, it reconstructs scene geometry from panoramic image sequences (RGB or RGBD) via splats while also detecting the camera poses.Such a framework is important to understand the full surrounding, e.g., for augmented reality applications or autonomous systems.We extended existing 3DGS-SLAM methods to handle omnidirectional input by including closed-form gradients for mapping and camera pose estimation, utilizing an equirectangular projection model.To lower memory footprint, a key frame removal procedure based on graph analysis is proposed, enabling the application to handle larger input sizes.For evaluation, we provide a data set of controlled real-world and synthetic test scenes (indoor and outdoor), employing a custom developed virtual camera lens.An extensive evaluation shows that, for camera tracking, the proposed method achieves statistically significant lower ATE RMSE scores compared to a recent omnidirectional SLAM system, as well as other 3DGS-SLAM frameworks, while reaching a similar mapping performance.