Pose Graph Optimization

Momentum

1 paper in the last four weeks, with none the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 17

Oct 8, 2026cs.CV

Fast Pose Tracking of Rigid Objects with Compact Pose Graph Optimization

Tracking a novel object's 6D pose over long horizons currently requires either expensive onboarding or a reconstruction maintained throughout the sequence. This makes current trackers impractical for robotic manipulation and augmented reality, which need trackers that are ready to use and run in real time. We show that a lightweight tracking module can be applied on top of a wide range of correspondence estimation methods to keep drifts bounded while maintaining fast runtime. Our key idea is to avoid point-based optimization in the pose graph and operate only on relative pose constraints, which we weight by a derived uncertainty from the geometric alignment. This makes optimization independent of the number of correspondences while avoiding the direct inclusion of noisy point measurements, leading to fast and robust long-term tracking. Across four real-world benchmarks, our approach achieves tracking accuracy comparable to reconstruction-based trackers with a fraction of the optimization cost. Overall, these results suggest that a compact and reliable pose graph optimization can provide long-horizon consistency at substantially lower computational cost.
Oct 5, 2026cs.CV

VGGT-Bridge: Beyond Sequential Pose Graphs via Coarse-Stride Skip Edges

Feed-forward visual geometry transformers such as VGGT reconstruct dense 3D structure from images in a single forward pass, simplifying multi-view 3D reconstruction. However, their quadratic attention complexity makes them difficult to scale to long sequences with thousands of frames. Chunk-and-align frameworks address this by splitting a long sequence into overlapping chunks and stitching their local reconstructions into a pose graph. Yet existing methods connect only sequentially adjacent chunks, so small per-frame errors accumulate along the chain into large-scale drift. To move beyond sequential edges, we propose VGGT-Bridge, which adds long-range skip edges that directly constrain non-adjacent chunks without retraining. By running VGGT on sparsely sampled coarse chunks, each coarse chunk bridges distant fine chunks into a single direct constraint. We further turn VGGT's first-frame scale bias into a drift correction by feeding selected coarse chunks in reverse, and a loop-aware policy keeps this reversal compatible with existing loop closures. VGGT-Bridge reduces ATE by 28.3% on KITTI Odometry, 18.8% on Virtual KITTI, and 10.0% on Waymo Open over the SwiftVGGT baseline, achieving the best performance among all chunk-and-align methods.
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

Spectral Consistency-Guided Multiview Point Cloud Registration for Low-Overlap Scenes

Multiview point cloud registration is particularly challenging in low-overlap scenes, where reliable correspondences are limited and incorrect pairwise transformations can affect global pose estimation. In addition, registering all scan pairs is computationally expensive because many pairs provide weak geometric information. To address these problems, we propose GMPCR, a non-learning-based spectral consistency-guided framework for efficient and robust multiview point cloud registration. GMPCR builds a refined second-order compatibility structure from initial correspondences and uses its dominant spectral response to evaluate both correspondence reliability and scan-pair confidence. This allows unreliable correspondences to be filtered and informative scan pairs to be selected before relative transformation estimation, leading to a sparse pose graph and reduced pairwise registration cost. For each retained scan pair, maximal-clique-based hypothesis generation is used to estimate reliable relative transformations. The resulting pose graph is further refined by an adaptive history-aware synchronization scheme, in which the effect of residual history is adjusted according to changes in the global rotation residual. A recovery mechanism also allows down-weighted edges to regain confidence when their global consistency improves. Experiments on 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, ScanNet, and ETH demonstrate the effectiveness of GMPCR. It achieves registration recalls of 97.2% and 89.6% on 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch, respectively, while maintaining competitive performance on ScanNet and ETH. The results show that GMPCR provides a favorable balance among registration accuracy, robustness to low overlap, and computational efficiency. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/swccj/gmpcr.
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

UniSim-SLAM: Feed-Forward SLAM with Unified Sim(3) Optimization

Recent geometric foundation models enable feed-forward inference for SLAM, but their predictions are strongly dependent on the input view set, which leads to geometric inconsistencies and trajectory drift when results are chained over long sequences. Online deployment further exposes a trade-off between the low latency of two-view tracking and the constraint richness of multi-view inference. We introduce UniSim-SLAM, an integrated system that runs lightweight two-view keyframe tracking in the frontend and performs periodic multi-view submap refinement in the backend. To combine predictions defined in heterogeneous local coordinates with inconsistent scales, we formulate a unified multi-level factor graph on Sim(3)Sim(3) that jointly optimizes global keyframe poses and submap poses. The graph integrates temporal view-to-view odometry edges, view-to-submap bridge edges with depth-statistics scale anchoring, and submap-to-submap tie and scale constraints to enforce consistent similarity relations across submaps. Experiments on TUM RGB-D and 7-Scenes show that UniSim-SLAM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in the uncalibrated setting, reducing trajectory error by 38.5%38.5\% on TUM RGB-D and 45.9%45.9\% on 7-Scenes compared to prior best results. Project page: https://vision3d-lab.github.io/unisim-slam/
Jul 15, 2026cs.RO

Improving Map Consistency in Graph-Based LiDAR SLAM Through Information-Aware Odometry and Retroactive Loop Closure

High-quality maps are fundamental for robotics tasks such as navigation and planning. Although modern graph-based LiDAR SLAM systems achieve good trajectory accuracies, a low trajectory error alone does not guarantee geometrically consistent maps, particularly at revisit locations where missed loop closures and residual drift can produce local misalignments. In this work, we address the problem of jointly improving global trajectory estimation and local map quality in 3D LiDAR SLAM. We first propose a framework to efficiently estimate geometry-dependent information matrices for ICP, enabling principled weighting of odometry constraints in a pose graph. We then introduce a hierarchical loop-closure module that decouples place recognition from geometric registration, together with a retroactive loop-closure module that exploits the optimized pose graph to recover missed loop closures. We also propose an evaluation protocol to measure map consistency at revisit locations. We evaluate our SLAM system on several datasets against state-of-the-art LiDAR SLAM systems. Experimental results demonstrate global trajectory accuracies on par with or better than existing methods while consistently improving local geometric map consistency at revisit locations. These results suggest that coupling uncertainty-aware odometry with geometry-guided loop-closure refinement leads to more accurate trajectories and higher-quality maps.
Jul 9, 2026cs.RO

Learning Adaptive Solvers for Distributed Factor Graph Optimization on Matrix Lie Groups

Modern robotic perception increasingly involves large-scale geometric optimization problems distributed across multiple robots or sessions. However, existing distributed solvers often depend on brittle hand tuning and primarily target rigid body pose graphs. To address this, we present DeepCORD, a learning-augmented framework for distributed factor graph optimization on general matrix Lie groups. By unfolding a parallel and accelerated Riemannian optimizer into differentiable iterations, DeepCORD learns a self-supervised feedback policy that dynamically adapts solver parameters according to the optimization phase and communication status. The resulting method enables adaptive distributed optimization over matrix Lie groups under both synchronous and asynchronous communication regimes. Extensive experiments on real-world SE\mathrm{SE}(3) pose graph optimization and SL\mathrm{SL}(4) projective submap alignment show that our method achieves lower objective values than existing distributed baselines on most benchmarks across realistic operating scenarios.
Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

TACO: A Test and Check Framework for Robust Pose Graph Optimization

Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) is one of the most widely adopted approaches for solving Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problems. However, PGO approaches are particularly sensitive to outliers, which can substantially degrade the quality of the estimated trajectories. These outliers arise from incorrect place recognition associations caused by perceptual aliasing in the environment. In this paper, we present TACO (short for Test And Check Optimization), a robust optimization framework designed to filter out outliers from PGO systems. Rather than explicitly modeling measurements as inliers or outliers, TACO finds an approximation to the maximally consistent set of measurements incrementally through two complementary components: (i) The test component, namely the Incremental Probabilistic Consensus (IPC) algorithm, evaluates the consistency of each incoming loop closure online. (ii) The check component dubbed Switchable Outlier Sanitization leverages the existing Switchable Constraints to periodically sanitize any inconsistent measurements from the consistent set that IPC may have mistakenly included. We evaluate TACO on 2D SLAM and 3D Visual SLAM datasets against several state-of-the-art methods. The results show robustness comparable to state-of-the-art offline methods while preserving the computational efficiency required for online deployment, achieving a success rate above 90% in 2D and 83% in 3D across outlier rates up to 50%, with mean convergence times of approximately 45 ms and 100 ms, respectively. We release an open-source implementation of our method with this paper.
Jun 23, 2026cs.RO

Decentralized Pose Graph Riemannian Optimization for Object-based Multi-Robot SLAM

Pose graph optimization (PGO) is a key back-end component for state estimation in networked multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). In object-based multi-robot SLAM, the problem becomes more tightly coupled because robots must jointly estimate both their trajectories and the poses of persistent objects observed by multiple agents. Existing decentralized solutions often assume that the communication graph closely matches the physical interaction topology, which is restrictive in realistic deployments where communication is sparse, intermittent, or time-varying. This paper presents a fully decentralized Riemannian optimization framework for object-based multi-robot PGO that decouples the coupled estimation problem via a consensus mechanism, enabling flexible communication topologies. To improve convergence under limited communication budgets, we further develop a distributed approximate-Newton scheme that exploits local second-order information while operating directly on the SE(d) manifold to preserve geometric consistency, and we establish the convergence to Riemannian first-order stationary points and provide a local condition-number analysis explaining the benefit of approximate second-order information over first-order Riemannian descent. The resulting method reduces iteration count and communication overhead without sacrificing estimation accuracy. Extensive evaluations on public benchmarks, large-scale simulations, and real-world multi-robot experiments demonstrate improved accuracy, runtime efficiency, scalability across network topologies, and robustness to communication failures.
Jun 16, 2026cs.CV

MoonSplat: Monocular Online Gaussian Splatting with Sim(3) Global Optimization

Online 3D reconstruction from monocular image sequences is a challenging and ongoing research topic. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), leveraging its high-quality real-time rendering capability, empowers online 3D reconstruction to represent dense scenes with enhanced expressiveness, and thus holds great promise for a wide range of applications such as robotics and AR/VR. However, existing online 3DGS methods still suffer from some key challenges: fragile camera pose estimation due to the lack of global optimization, and low optimization efficiency in large-scale or long-sequence scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a robust and efficient online voxelized 3DGS reconstruction framework integrated with global Sim(3)\text{Sim}(3) optimization, which enables reliable camera tracking and efficient global loop closure for both camera poses and voxelized 3DGS. To accelerate the convergence of the voxelized 3DGS, we further introduce a color residual learning strategy, which not only boosts optimization speed but also enhances rendering quality. Extensive experiments on diverse indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both camera pose estimation accuracy and rendering quality, while retaining real-time efficiency. Additionally, we develop and deploy a real-world UAV-based active reconstruction system grounded on our proposed method, validating its robustness and generalizability for practical online 3D reconstruction tasks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/TrickyGo/MoonSplat.
Jun 13, 2026cs.RO

FD-SLAM: Fast Dense Radar-Inertial SLAM with Frequency-Domain Loop Closure and Pose Graph Optimization

Radar SLAM is attractive for autonomous ground vehicles operating in visually degraded environments, however, scanning radars are noisy, have low scanning rates, and their measurements are challenging to match reliably over long trajectories. This paper presents FD-SLAM, a fast dense radar-inertial SLAM system that extends dense radar-inertial odometry with frequency-domain loop closure and pose graph optimization. The proposed method preserves an image-like structure of scanning radar measurements by using a compact frequency-domain polar descriptor for loop-candidate retrieval and a multi-stage verification pipeline based on temporal filtering, phase-correlation screening, scan-alignment similarity, and geometric consistency checks. Verified loop closures are added as non-sequential constraints in an SE(2) pose graph together with radar-inertial odometry factors. FD-SLAM is evaluated on a publicly available dataset using standard KITTI evaluation metrics. The results show that FD-SLAM improves FD-RIO baseline, achieves competitive performance against current state-of-the-art radar SLAM methods, and provides favorable rotational accuracy across multiple evaluated driving trajectories. Runtime analysis further indicates that the radar-inertial front-end operates above the radar sampling rate on a CPU-only setup, while loop closure detection and graph optimization remain suitable for parallel background execution.
Jun 12, 2026cs.RO

BIM-Loc: BIM-Integrated Discrepancy-Aware LiDAR-based Indoor Localization

Accurate and robust localization is a fundamental requirement for service and inspection robots, particularly in feature-sparse indoor environments where traditional systems struggle due to a lack of distinct landmarks. While prior maps can enhance robustness, precise and compact maps capturing real-world details are often unavailable for new or frequently changing environments. This paper presents BIM-Loc, a novel discrepancy-aware LiDAR-based localization method that directly integrates Building Information Models (BIM) from the design phase. BIM-Loc simultaneously estimates trajectories aligned with the BIM coordinate system and identifies discrepancies between real-world observations and the as-designed BIM in an online fashion. Our core contributions include: (1) a novel multi-hit ray casting strategy for efficient BIM-point data association and projection of 3D observations into 2D texture space; (2) a pose graph optimization framework with BIM-integrated factors that enforces consistency among odometry, sequential scans, and BIM structures; and (3) a hierarchical Bayesian inference module that incrementally updates a continuous 2D surface representation for discrepancy detection, propagating updates from the pixel to the structure level. Extensive evaluations in both simulation and real-world applications demonstrate that BIM-Loc significantly outperforms state-of-the-art map-based methods in localization accuracy and robustness.
Jun 4, 2026cs.RO

Meridian: Metric-Semantic Primitive Matching for Cross-View Geo-Localization Beyond Urban Environments

Successful robot automation requires accurate global localization to support repeatability, task planning, goal specification, and safe operation. However, reliable localization in GNSS-denied environments remains an open problem. Overhead aerial imagery offers a promising solution, but existing approaches primarily target structured urban environments and have been rarely demonstrated in unstructured natural terrain. Limitations of the state-of-the-art include a reliance on models trained for specific environments, as well as difficulty handling repetitive geometries and featureless landscapes commonly found in natural outdoor areas. To overcome these challenges, we present Meridian, a method for matching high-level metric-semantic primitives across aerial images and ground robot RGB-D camera data that achieves accurate global localization and generalizes well across diverse environments, all without any training or algorithmic fine-tuning on area-specific data. We formulate novel consistency metrics to estimate a distribution over robot submap poses and to reject outlier hypotheses in a robust pose graph optimization step for accurate robot trajectory estimation. We demonstrate that our algorithm can localize a ground robot across a wide variety of environments, including an autonomous driving dataset, a park and campus area, and a wilderness camp, with an average optimized trajectory error of 2.4 m over 19 km of ground traversal.
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Anchor3R: Streaming 3D Reconstruction with Transient Anchors for Long-Horizon Visual Mapping

Long-horizon online visual mapping requires continuous camera-motion and scene-geometry estimation under bounded computation. Recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction models provide strong geometric priors, but streaming variants often predict poses in a fixed or historically maintained coordinate system, leading to train--test mismatch, early-anchor attention bias, and accumulated drift. We propose \emph{Anchor3R}, a current-centric streaming 3D reconstruction framework that predicts window-relative poses and local geometry in the current-frame coordinate system. Overlapping predictions form a dense relative-pose graph, supporting online pose updates and loop-aware motion averaging for global reconstruction. Experiments on indoor, outdoor, driving, and RGB-D benchmarks demonstrate improved long-horizon pose accuracy and dense reconstruction quality over existing streaming baselines. Despite being trained only on 48-frame sequences, Anchor3R directly generalizes to streams exceeding 10,000 frames while maintaining bounded GPU memory during online inference. Code is available at https://github.com/polar-explorer/Anchor3R.
May 24, 2026cs.RO

A Decentralized LiDAR-SLAM System with Certifiably Optimal Pose Graph Optimization

Decentralized multi-robot LiDAR-SLAM is essential for collaborative missions but faces significant challenges in maintaining global consistency. Existing frameworks predominantly rely on local-search optimization or one-time coordinate alignment, which are prone to suboptimal convergence and long-term inconsistency, especially in large-scale or degenerate environments. To address these limitations, this paper presents the first decentralized LiDAR-SLAM system that integrates a state-of-the-art certifiably optimal Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) backend. By leveraging the Riemannian Block Coordinate Descent (RBCD) algorithm, our system ensures globally consistent trajectory estimation without requiring accurate initial guesses. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior robustness, improving trajectory RMSE by up to 48.9% compared to the state-of-the-art DiSCo-SLAM.
May 11, 2026cs.RO

Distributed Pose Graph Optimization via Continuous Riemannian Dynamics

We present a framework for distributed Pose Graph Optimization (PGO) by formulating the problem as a second-order continuous-time dynamical system evolving on Lie groups. By modeling pose variables as massive particles subject to damping, the equilibrium points of the resulting Riemannian dynamics coincide with first-order critical points of the original PGO problem. Using the governing damped Euler--Poincaré equations and a semi-implicit geometric integrator, we design an optimization algorithm that generalizes existing algorithms such as Riemannian gradient descent and Gauss--Newton. In multi-robot settings, we present a fully distributed and parallel method based on block-diagonal mass and damping matrices, where each robot solves an ordinary differential equation for its own poses with minimal communication overhead. Moreover, modeling both state and velocity enables principled neighbor prediction that significantly improves convergence under delayed communication. Theoretically, we present an analysis and establish sufficient condition that ensures energy dissipation under the employed geometric discretization scheme. Experiments on benchmark PGO datasets demonstrate that the proposed solver achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art distributed baselines in both synchronous and asynchronous regimes.
May 6, 2026cs.RO

Dr-PoGO: Direct Radar Pose-Graph Optimization

This paper introduces Dr-PoGO, a method for Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) using a 2D spinning radar. Unlike cameras or lidars that require line-of-sight, millimetre-wave radars can `see' through dust, falling snow, rain, etc. Accordingly, it is a great modality for robust perception regardless of the weather conditions. While most existing radar-based SLAM methods rely on the extraction of point clouds or features to perform ego-motion estimation, Dr-PoGO leverages direct registration techniques for odometry (DRO) and loop-closure registration. An off-the-shelf radar-focused place recognition algorithm, RaPlace, provides loop-closure candidates. As RaPlace does not provide relative transformations, Dr-PoGO introduces a coarse-to-fine registration that uses visual features and descriptors to obtain an initial guess for the direct transformation refinement. The global trajectory is optimized in a pose-graph optimization. Dr-PoGO demonstrates state-of-the-art performance over 300km of data in various real-world automotive environments. Our implementation is publicly available: https://github.com/utiasASRL/dr_pogo.
Apr 16, 2026cs.RO

Dual Pose-Graph Semantic Localization for Vision-Based Autonomous Drone Racing

Autonomous drone racing demands robust real-time localization under extreme conditions: high-speed flight, aggressive maneuvers, and payload-constrained platforms that often rely on a single camera for perception. Existing visual SLAM systems, while effective in general scenarios, struggle with motion blur and feature instability inherent to racing dynamics, and do not exploit the structured nature of racing environments. In this work, we present a dual pose-graph architecture that fuses odometry with semantic detections for robust localization. A temporary graph accumulates multiple gate observations between keyframes and optimizes them into a single refined constraint per landmark, which is then promoted to a persistent main graph. This design preserves the information richness of frequent detections while preventing graph growth from degrading real-time performance. The system is designed to be sensor-agnostic, although in this work we validate it using monocular visual-inertial odometry and visual gate detections. Experimental evaluation on the TII-RATM dataset shows a 56% to 74% reduction in ATE compared to standalone VIO, while an ablation study confirms that the dual-graph architecture achieves 10% to 12% higher accuracy than a single-graph baseline at identical computational cost. Deployment in the A2RL competition demonstrated that the system performs real-time onboard localization during flight, reducing the drift of the odometry baseline by up to 4.2 m per lap.