MGSO: Monocular Real-time Photometric SLAM with Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting

Real-time SLAM with dense 3D mapping is computationally challenging, especially on resource-limited devices. The recent development of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a promising approach for real-time dense 3D reconstruction. However, existing 3DGS-based SLAM systems struggle to balance hardware simplicity, speed, and map quality. Most systems excel in one or two of the aforementioned aspects but rarely achieve all. A key issue is the difficulty of initializing 3D Gaussians while concurrently conducting SLAM. To address these challenges, we present Monocular GSO (MGSO), a novel real-time SLAM system that integrates photometric SLAM with 3DGS. Photometric SLAM provides dense structured point clouds for 3DGS initialization, accelerating optimization and producing more efficient maps with fewer Gaussians. As a result, experiments show that our system generates reconstructions with a balance of quality, memory efficiency, and speed that outperforms the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, our system achieves all results using RGB inputs. We evaluate the Replica, TUM-RGBD, and EuRoC datasets against current live dense reconstruction systems. Not only do we surpass contemporary systems, but experiments also show that we maintain our performance on laptop hardware, making it a practical solution for robotics, A/R, and other real-time applications.