Spherical-GOF: Geometry-Aware Panoramic Gaussian Opacity Fields for 3D Scene Reconstruction

Scaling 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to large outdoor scenes is costly in both data acquisition and computation. Adopting panoramic images with equirectangular projection (ERP) can reduce capture effort via their full $360^{\circ}$ field of view, yet the resulting omnipresent visibility invalidates existing partitioning strategies that rely on local camera frustums, causing block-wise optimization to degenerate into global training. Thus, we propose PanoLOG, a two-stage coarse-to-fine framework equipped with a Geometry and Gradient-based Partitioning Strategy tailored for large-scale panoramic 3DGS reconstruction. In the global coarse stage, PanoLOG leverages sky-sphere modeling and panoramic monocular depth supervision for reliable geometry, while in the refinement stage, G$^2$PS builds adaptive bounding volumes via parallax-driven uncertainty and assigns cameras via gradient-based importance scoring. Furthermore, we construct Pano360, the first benchmark on large-scale panoramic dataset for outdoor scene reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that G$^2$PS achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality while maintaining scalable, block-parallel training. Our models, training code, and dataset are publicly available.

Real-time dense SLAM is a core capability for robotics applications that require robust localization and high- quality mapping in dynamic or fast-changing environments. Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based SLAM methods have shown promising performance, but most are designed for narrow-FoV pinhole cameras, where limited angular coverage weakens pose observability and often leads to unstable photo- metric optimization under rapid motion and large viewpoint changes. We present PanoGS-SLAM, the first panoramic dense SLAM system built on 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our method per- forms differentiable rendering and pose optimization directly in the spherical domain, enabling omnidirectional photometric constraints for more stable tracking. To improve geometric consistency and robustness, we introduce (1) a sphere-consistent photometric loss that compensates for the area distortion of equirectangular projection, and (2) a depth-guided Gaussian initialization strategy that stabilizes incremental mapping in newly observed regions. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic panoramic benchmarks (PALVIO and SynPano) show that PanoGS-SLAM consistently outperforms geometric and GS-based baselines in tracking accuracy and rendering quality, while achieving fast front-end convergence and real-time perfor- mance. In addition, controlled field-of-view experiments reveal a clear monotonic improvement in optimization conditioning and convergence stability as angular coverage increases, high- lighting the fundamental role of sensing geometry in shaping the optimization landscape of differentiable Gaussian-based SLAM. The source code will be made publicly available.

Existing 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) frameworks rely on camera-specific rasterization, suffering from inconsistent solid-angle sampling and degraded performance across heterogeneous camera models (e.g., perspective, fisheye, omnidirectional). To address this limitation, we propose UniTriSplat, a unified 3DGS framework for universal cameras that reformulates Gaussian splatting on the unit sphere via HEALPix discretization. Leveraging the equal-area property of HEALPix, we construct a spherical sampling grid aligned with the angular resolution of input images. We derive the forward rendering and gradient propagation of Gaussians directly in the spherical radian domain, yielding uniform optimization behavior from narrow-FoV images to full 360-degree panoramas. To enhance perceptual reconstruction quality, we additionally introduce a HEALPix-aware SSIM loss that respects spherical neighborhood structure. Extensive experiments across diverse camera models demonstrate that UniTriSplat consistently improves cross-camera generalization while preserving geometric fidelity and rendering quality.