cs.ROMar 16, 2026

Robust Dynamic Object Detection in Cluttered Indoor Scenes via Learned Spatiotemporal Cues

Authors: Juan Rached, Yixuan Jia, Kota Kondo, Jonathan P. How

Organizations: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Abstract

Reliable dynamic object detection in cluttered environments remains a critical challenge for autonomous navigation. Purely geometric LiDAR pipelines that rely on clustering and heuristic filtering can miss dynamic obstacles when they move in close proximity to static structure or are only partially observed. Vision-augmented approaches can provide additional semantic cues, but are often limited by closed-set detectors and camera field-of-view constraints, reducing robustness to novel obstacles and out-of-frustum events. In this work, we present a LiDAR-only framework that fuses temporal occupancy-grid-based motion segmentation with a learned bird's-eye-view (BEV) dynamic prior. A fusion module prioritizes 3D detections when available, while using the learned dynamic grid to recover detections that would otherwise be lost due to proximity-induced false negatives. Experiments with motion-capture ground truth show our method achieves 28.67% higher recall and 18.50% higher F1 score than the state-of-the-art in substantially cluttered environments while maintaining comparable precision and position error.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Mar 20, 2026

Real-Time Structural Detection for Indoor Navigation from 3D LiDAR Using Bird's-Eye-View Images

Efficient structural perception is essential for mapping and autonomous navigation on resource-constrained robots. Existing 3D methods are computationally prohibitive, while traditional 2D geometric approaches lack robustness. This paper presents a lightweight, real-time framework that projects 3D LiDAR data into 2D Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) images to enable efficient detection of structural elements relevant to mapping and navigation. Within this representation, we systematically evaluate several feature extraction strategies, including classical geometric techniques (Hough Transform, RANSAC, and LSD) and a deep learning detector based on YOLO-OBB. The resulting detections are integrated through a spatiotemporal fusion module that improves stability and robustness across consecutive frames. Experiments conducted on a standard mobile robotic platform highlight clear performance trade-offs. Classical methods such as Hough and LSD provide fast responses but exhibit strong sensitivity to noise, with LSD producing excessive segment fragmentation that leads to system congestion. RANSAC offers improved robustness but fails to meet real-time constraints. In contrast, the YOLO-OBB-based approach achieves the best balance between robustness and computational efficiency, maintaining an end-to-end latency (satisfying 10 Hz operation) while effectively filtering cluttered observations in a low-power single-board computer (SBC) without using GPU acceleration. The main contribution of this work is a computationally efficient BEV-based perception pipeline enabling reliable real-time structural detection from 3D LiDAR on resource-constrained robotic platforms that cannot rely on GPU-intensive processing. The source code and pre-trained models are publicly available.
Sep 16, 2026

Dynamic-LIVO: A Dynamic-Aware LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry System Using Spatio-Temporal Normals

This paper proposes Dynamic-LIVO, a dynamic-aware LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry (LIVO) system for robust state estimation and static colored mapping in dynamic environments. Dynamic-LIVO employs Spatio-Temporal (S-T) normal analysis to identify dynamic LiDAR points and propagates the resulting classification to both LiDAR-inertial and visual-inertial updates, preventing dynamic LiDAR measurements and their associated visual observations from affecting state estimation and mapping. However, S-T normal estimation can be unreliable in newly observed and spatially sparse regions due to insufficient spatio-temporal observations. To address this issue, we introduce a time-delayed S-T normal estimation strategy that defers the classification of insufficiently constrained points and re-evaluates them as additional observations become available. This strategy improves dynamic classification reliability while preserving valid static points for map construction. Extensive experiments on public and self-collected datasets with diverse sensor configurations demonstrate that Dynamic-LIVO improves localization accuracy and produces cleaner static colored maps in challenging dynamic environments. The source code and self-collected dataset will be publicly released upon acceptance.
Oct 19, 2026

CAOS-SLAM: Class-Agnostic Object-Aware Real-Time vSLAM for Dynamic Environments

Robust visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) in dynamic environments faces challenges due to the presence of moving objects that may introduce erroneous observations, corrupt the map reconstruction and overall degrade localization accuracy. Existing vSLAM approaches often rely on predefined semantic classes or costly pixel-wise classification, limiting their robustness or applicability in real-world scenarios. This paper presents CAOS-SLAM, a dynamic vSLAM framework that extends ORB-SLAM3 with a hybrid perception pipeline to detect, track, and filter both semantically known and previously unseen moving objects in real-time. On-demand panoptic segmentation is performed for object discovery, with candidate unknown objects instantiated through depth-based clustering of unclassified regions. Between panoptic updates, persistent object tracks are updated using lightweight detection when available or temporal mask propagation based on world-frame Kalman prediction, depth consistency, and appearance similarity. The estimated object motion is then used to reject dynamic features from the SLAM pipeline. Experimental results on multiple dynamic RGB-D datasets and real-world experiments demonstrate improved localization accuracy over state-of-the-art dynamic vSLAM approaches, achieving up to 59% lower localization error in scenes characterized by unknown dynamic objects and up to 88% lower error in heavily occluded scenes, while achieving a median processing rate of 30 FPS on a laptop. Furthermore, the tracking module provides estimates of object trajectories and velocities, supporting potential future applications in perception, navigation, and motion-planning tasks in dynamic environments. Code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.