cs.CVAug 3, 2026

CHOW-SLAM: Compact Hybrid Representation with Complementary Overlap Window Optimization for RGB-D SLAM

Authors: Wenxuan JiJin XiaoXiaoguang HuJiaqi ShiZichong JiaBaochang Zhang

Abstract

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) enables dense, continuous scene reconstruction. However, existing systems operating with limited online resources struggle to simultaneously construct two types of constraints, namely, compact yet discriminative spatial constraints derived from scene representations and persistent temporal constraints derived from historical observations. To address this challenge, we propose CHOW-SLAM, a dense RGB-D SLAM framework that explicitly constructs these complementary spatial and temporal constraints. Spatially, we propose a compact parametric-hash (P-H) hybrid representation that organizes components based on planes and grids across scales in P and H branches. A unified multi-output decoder further aligns the ray termination distributions induced by TSDF and density, preserving geometry and appearance under a compact parameter budget. Temporally, we propose a complementary overlap-window strategy to prevent optimization from being dominated by short-term overlap or weakly related historical observations. Within a fixed budget, the strategy retains recent frames, selects high-overlap local frames, and introduces temporally distributed historical keyframes. Loss-aware keyframe insertion and bundle adjustment scheduling further adapt optimization to tracking quality. In addition, ORB-based tracking and geometric pose estimation are used for pose initialization, followed by neural rendering optimization to improve tracking stability. Extensive evaluations on multiple datasets demonstrate that CHOW-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both scene reconstruction quality and camera tracking accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/jinjidexiaohuoban/CHOW-SLAM.

Explore similar work

Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

Multi-Submap Implicit Neural SLAM with Local-to-Global Loop Closure for Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based SLAM has demonstrated impressive results in small-scale scene reconstruction, yet scaling these methods to extensive, complex environments remains challenging due to catastrophic forgetting and accumulated trajectory drift. This paper presents a robust, large-scale neural SLAM system featuring a multi-submap architecture and a dual-tier loop closure mechanism. Specifically, we propose a progressive mapping strategy that dynamically allocates neural submaps to maintain high-fidelity representations without memory explosion. For robust pose estimation, an optical-flow-based tracking module is integrated to handle aggressive motions. To address global consistency, we introduce a local-to-global loop closure framework leveraging the foundation model for high-performance global descriptor extraction, significantly enhancing relocalization accuracy under varying viewpoints. Furthermore, an inter-submap online distillation algorithm is designed during back-end optimization to enforce geometric and appearance consistency across overlapping submap boundaries. To validate the system, we developed a customized handheld mechatronic platform and conducted extensive evaluations on both public benchmarks and our large-scale indoor-outdoor datasets. Experimental results, including direct deployment on an onboard computing unit, demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art neural SLAM methods in reconstruction quality and localization robustness, providing a scalable solution for real-world robotic perception and digital twinning. We will release the code publicly on \href{https://github.com/dtc111111/MSN-SLAM}{https://github.com/dtc111111/MSN-SLAM} .
Tianchen Deng, Chongdi Wang, Nailin Wang +6
Jul 25, 2025cs.CV

DINO-SLAM: DINO-informed RGB-D SLAM for Neural Implicit and Explicit Representations

This paper presents DINO-SLAM, a DINO-informed design strategy to enhance implicit (Neural Radiance Field -- NeRF) and explicit representations (Gaussian Splatting -- GS) in SLAM systems through the more comprehensive semantics understanding enabled by DINO. This latter alone, however, lacks proper 3D geometry understanding, allowing only for marginal improvements. Therefore, we rely on a Scene Geometry Encoder (SGE) to enrich DINO features into geometry-aware DINO features (geoDINO), to better understand those geometric relationships that vanilla DINO features fail to capture. Building upon it, we propose two foundational paradigms for NeRF and GS SLAM systems integrating geoDINO features. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our DINO-informed pipelines achieve superior performance on the Replica, ScanNet, and TUM datasets.
Ziren Gong, Xiaohan Li, Fabio Tosi +4
Sep 17, 2026cs.CV

AMB3R-SLAM: Kilometer-scale SLAM with Hierarchical Backend

We present AMB3R-SLAM, a real-time monocular SLAM system capable of reconstructing kilometer-scale trajectories over 10k frames on a single consumer-grade GPU. Our model couples a lightweight front-end for low-latency online tracking with a hierarchical backend that progressively enforces local, mid-level, and global consistency. By avoiding bundle adjustment that relies on the static world assumption, our system naturally handles complex dynamic scenes out of the box. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method can be extended to leverage stereo, RGB-D, and LiDAR as additional inputs. AMB3R-SLAM achieves strong camera tracking performance across 9 datasets, reducing the absolute trajectory error (ATE) of previous state-of-the-art methods on VBR and Oxford Spires by over 70%. With additional LiDAR input, our model further reduces ATE to sub-meter level on KITTI and VBR datasets.
Hengyi Wang, Lourdes Agapito