NGD-SLAM: Towards Real-Time Dynamic SLAM without GPU
Authors: Yuhao Zhang, Mihai Bujanca, Mikel Luján
Organizations: University of Manchester. 2University of Cambridge. · 3Qualcomm Technologies XR Labs, Austria.
Abstract
Many existing visual SLAM methods can achieve high localization accuracy in dynamic environments by leveraging deep learning to mask moving objects. However, these methods incur significant computational overhead as the camera tracking needs to wait for the deep neural network to generate mask at each frame, and they typically require GPUs for real-time operation, which restricts their practicality in real-world robotic applications. Therefore, this paper proposes a real-time dynamic SLAM system that runs exclusively on a CPU. Our approach incorporates a mask propagation mechanism that decouples camera tracking and deep learning-based masking for each frame. We also introduce a hybrid tracking strategy that integrates ORB features with optical flow methods, enhancing both robustness and efficiency by selectively allocating computational resources to input frames. Compared to previous methods, our system maintains high localization accuracy in dynamic environments while achieving a tracking frame rate of 60 FPS on a laptop CPU. These results demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing deep learning for dynamic SLAM without GPU support. Since most existing dynamic SLAM systems are not open-source, we make our code publicly available at: https://github.com/yuhaozhang7/NGD-SLAM
With the growing demand for robotics, autonomous drones, and wearable extended reality systems, the deployment of Visual SLAM on embedded devices remains challenging. Tracking must sustain high frame rates while preserving compute resources for map extension and maintenance. This paper presents GLidE-SLAM, a monocular hybrid indirect-direct framework that addresses this by architectural separation: the system performs GPU-accelerated direct tracking on intermediate frames, while reserving the full indirect pipeline for map extension and global consistency. We leverage highly parallel image-alignment operations for pose-only estimation without depth optimization or map point creation, making the workload suitable for GPU offloading and freeing CPU resources for backend tasks. We implement the direct tracker using vendor-agnostic OpenGL ES~3.1 compute shaders, enabling deployment across a broader range of commodity embedded platforms without requiring CUDA support. To our knowledge, this is the first complete direct photometric pose estimator realized via compute shaders for embedded-class devices. Experiments on target platforms demonstrate up to 9× higher frame rates than the CPU-only baseline while maintaining trajectory accuracy and improving practical deployment across commodity resource-constrained hardware.
Carlos A. Pinheiro de Sousa, Heiko Hamann, Oliver Deussen
Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled significant progress in dense dynamic Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM). Prevailing methods typically discard predefined dynamic objects, ignoring that transiently static objects offer valuable geometric constraints for pose estimation. A recent work attempts to leverage this potential by employing per-pixel uncertainty maps to quantify the magnitude of motion. While this approach enables transiently static objects to enhance pose estimation, it erroneously integrates these objects into the static map, resulting in persistent artifacts. Moreover, its reliance on purely geometric information leads to ambiguous object boundaries in the uncertainty maps. To overcome these limitations, we present DL-SLAM, a monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM system built upon a novel dual-level probabilistic framework. Our method computes dynamic probability maps by combining semantic and geometric information. These pixel-level probabilities are lifted to 3D and aggregated to derive an object-level dynamic probability for each instance. Object-level probability enables the categorical pruning of dynamic Gaussians, resulting in an artifact-free static map. The static map, in turn, provides a geometrically consistent guidance to refine the pixel-wise probabilities, enhancing their reliability. Experimental results demonstrate that DL-SLAM outperforms existing approaches, improving tracking accuracy by up to 13% while generating high-fidelity semantic maps.
Handling the dynamic environments is a significant research challenge in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Recent research combines 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) with SLAM to achieve both robust camera pose estimation and photorealistic renderings. However, using SLAM to efficiently reconstruct both static and dynamic regions remains challenging. In this work, we propose an efficient framework for dynamic 3DGS SLAM guided by optical flow. Using the input depth and prior optical flow, we first propose a category-agnostic motion mask generation strategy by fitting a camera ego-motion model to decompose the optical flow. This module separates dynamic and static Gaussians and simultaneously provides flow-guided camera pose initialization. We boost the training speed of dynamic 3DGS by explicitly modeling their temporal centers at keyframes. These centers are propagated using 3D scene flow priors and are dynamically initialized with an adaptive insertion strategy. Alongside this, we model the temporal opacity and rotation using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to adaptively learn the complex dynamics. The empirical results demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance in tracking, dynamic reconstruction, and training efficiency.