Despite advancements in SLAM technologies, robust operation under challenging conditions such as low-texture, motion-blur, or challenging lighting remains an open challenge. Such conditions are common in applications such as assistive navigation for the visually impaired. These challenges undermine localization accuracy and tracking stability, reducing navigation reliability and safety. To overcome these limitations, we present SELM-SLAM3, a deep learning-enhanced visual SLAM framework that integrates SuperPoint and LightGlue for robust feature extraction and matching. We evaluated our framework using TUM RGB-D, ICL-NUIM, and TartanAir datasets, which feature diverse and challenging scenarios. SELM-SLAM3 outperforms conventional ORB-SLAM3 by an average of 87.84% and exceeds state-of-the-art RGB-D SLAM systems by 36.77%. Our framework demonstrates enhanced performance under challenging conditions, such as low-texture scenes and fast motion, providing a reliable platform for developing navigation aids for the visually impaired.

Visual SLAM in dynamic environments remains challenging, as several existing methods rely on semantic filtering that only handles known object classes, or use fixed robust kernels that cannot adapt to unknown moving objects, leading to degraded accuracy when they appear in the scene. We present VAR-SLAM (Visual Adaptive and Robust SLAM), an ORB-SLAM3-based system that combines a lightweight semantic keypoint filter to deal with known moving objects, with Barron's adaptive robust loss to handle unknown ones. The shape parameter of the robust kernel is estimated online from residuals, allowing the system to automatically adjust between Gaussian and heavy-tailed behavior. We evaluate VAR-SLAM on the TUM RGB-D, Bonn RGB-D Dynamic, and OpenLORIS datasets, which include both known and unknown moving objects. Results show improved trajectory accuracy and robustness over state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 25% lower ATE RMSE than NGD-SLAM on challenging sequences, while maintaining performance at 27 FPS on average.

Vision algorithms can be executed directly on the image sensor when implemented on the next-generation sensors known as focal-plane sensor-processor arrays (FPSP)s, where every pixel has a processor. FPSPs greatly improve latency, reducing the problems associated with the bottleneck of data transfer from a vision sensor to a processor. FPSPs accelerate vision-based algorithms such as visual-inertial odometry (VIO). However, VIO frameworks suffer from spatial drift due to the vision-based pose estimation, whilst temporal drift arises from the inertial measurements. FPSPs circumvent the spatial drift by operating at a high frame rate to match the high-frequency output of the inertial measurements. In this paper, we present TCB-VIO, a tightly-coupled 6 degrees-of-freedom VIO by a Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter (MSCKF), operating at a high frame-rate of 250 FPS and from IMU measurements obtained at 400 Hz. TCB-VIO outperforms state-of-the-art methods: ROVIO, VINS-Mono, and ORB-SLAM3.

The tracking module of a visual-inertial SLAM system processes incoming image frames and IMU data to estimate the position of the frame in relation to the map. It is important for the tracking to complete in a timely manner for each frame to avoid poor localization or tracking loss. We therefore present a new approach which leverages GPU computing power to accelerate time-consuming components of tracking in order to improve its performance. These components include stereo feature matching and local map tracking. We implement our design inside the ORB-SLAM3 tracking process using CUDA. Our evaluation demonstrates an overall improvement in tracking performance of up to 2.8x on a desktop and Jetson Xavier NX board in stereo-inertial mode, using the well-known SLAM datasets EuRoC and TUM-VI.

Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) plays a crucial role in autonomous systems. Traditional SLAM methods, based on static environment assumptions, struggle to handle complex dynamic environments. Recent dynamic SLAM systems employ geometric constraints and deep learning to remove dynamic features, yet this creates a new challenge: insufficient remaining point features for subsequent SLAM processes. Existing solutions address this by continuously introducing additional line and plane features to supplement point features, achieving robust tracking and pose estimation. However, current methods continuously introduce additional features regardless of necessity, causing two problems: unnecessary computational overhead and potential performance degradation from accumulated low-quality additional features and noise. To address these issues, this paper proposes a feature-aware mechanism that evaluates whether current features are adequate to determine if line feature support should be activated. This decision mechanism enables the system to introduce line features only when necessary, significantly reducing computational complexity of additional features while minimizing the introduction of low-quality features and noise. In subsequent processing, the introduced line features assist in obtaining better initial camera poses through tracking, local mapping, and loop closure, but are excluded from global optimization to avoid potential negative impacts from low-quality additional features in long-term process. Extensive experiments on TUM datasets demonstrate substantial improvements in both ATE and RPE metrics compared to ORB-SLAM3 baseline and superior performance over other dynamic SLAM and multi-feature methods.

Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) plays a vital role in real-time localization for autonomous systems. However, traditional SLAM methods, which assume a static environment, often suffer from significant localization drift in dynamic scenarios. While recent advancements have improved SLAM performance in such environments, these systems still struggle with localization drift, particularly due to abrupt viewpoint changes and poorly characterized moving objects. In this paper, we propose a novel scene-object-based reliability assessment framework that comprehensively evaluates SLAM stability through both current frame quality metrics and scene changes relative to reliable reference frames. Furthermore, to tackle the lack of error correction mechanisms in existing systems when pose estimation becomes unreliable, we employ a pose refinement strategy that leverages information from reliable frames to optimize camera pose estimation, effectively mitigating the adverse effects of dynamic interference. Extensive experiments on the TUM RGB-D datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves substantial improvements in localization accuracy and system robustness under challenging dynamic scenarios.

Robust Visual SLAM (vSLAM) is essential for autonomous systems operating in real-world environments, where challenges such as dynamic objects, low texture, and critically, varying illumination conditions often degrade performance. Existing feature-based SLAM systems rely on fixed front-end parameters, making them vulnerable to sudden lighting changes and unstable feature tracking. To address these challenges, we propose ``IRAF-SLAM'', an Illumination-Robust and Adaptive Feature-Culling front-end designed to enhance vSLAM resilience in complex and challenging environments. Our approach introduces: (1) an image enhancement scheme to preprocess and adjust image quality under varying lighting conditions; (2) an adaptive feature extraction mechanism that dynamically adjusts detection sensitivity based on image entropy, pixel intensity, and gradient analysis; and (3) a feature culling strategy that filters out unreliable feature points using density distribution analysis and a lighting impact factor. Comprehensive evaluations on the TUM-VI and European Robotics Challenge (EuRoC) datasets demonstrate that IRAF-SLAM significantly reduces tracking failures and achieves superior trajectory accuracy compared to state-of-the-art vSLAM methods under adverse illumination conditions. These results highlight the effectiveness of adaptive front-end strategies in improving vSLAM robustness without incurring significant computational overhead. The implementation of IRAF-SLAM is publicly available at https://thanhnguyencanh. github.io/IRAF-SLAM/.

Visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) must remain accurate under extreme viewpoint, scale and illumination variations. The widely adopted ORB-SLAM3 falters in these regimes because it relies on hand-crafted ORB keypoints. We introduce SuperPoint-SLAM3, a drop-in upgrade that (i) replaces ORB with the self-supervised SuperPoint detector--descriptor, (ii) enforces spatially uniform keypoints via adaptive non-maximal suppression (ANMS), and (iii) integrates a lightweight NetVLAD place-recognition head for learning-based loop closure. On the KITTI Odometry benchmark SuperPoint-SLAM3 reduces mean translational error from 4.15% to 0.34% and mean rotational error from 0.0027 deg/m to 0.0010 deg/m. On the EuRoC MAV dataset it roughly halves both errors across every sequence (e.g., V2\_03: 1.58% -> 0.79%). These gains confirm that fusing modern deep features with a learned loop-closure module markedly improves ORB-SLAM3 accuracy while preserving its real-time operation. Implementation, pretrained weights and reproducibility scripts are available at https://github.com/shahram95/SuperPointSLAM3.

This paper presents a visual-inertial odometry (VIO) method using long-tracked features. Long-tracked features can constrain more visual frames, reducing localization drift. However, they may also lead to accumulated matching errors and drift in feature tracking. Current VIO methods adjust observation weights based on re-projection errors, yet this approach has flaws. Re-projection errors depend on estimated camera poses and map points, so increased errors might come from estimation inaccuracies, not actual feature tracking errors. This can mislead the optimization process and make long-tracked features ineffective for suppressing localization drift. Furthermore, long-tracked features constrain a larger number of frames, which poses a significant challenge to real-time performance of the system. To tackle these issues, we propose an active decoupling mechanism for accumulated errors in long-tracked feature utilization. We introduce a visual reference frame reset strategy to eliminate accumulated tracking errors and a depth prediction strategy to leverage the long-term constraint. To ensure real time preformane, we implement three strategies for efficient system state estimation: a parallel elimination strategy based on predefined elimination order, an inverse-depth elimination simplification strategy, and an elimination skipping strategy. Experiments on various datasets show that our method offers higher positioning accuracy with relatively short consumption time, making it more suitable for edge-enabled low-altitude IoT navigation, where high-accuracy positioning and real-time operation on edge device are required. The code will be published at github.

We aim to redefine robust ego-motion estimation and photorealistic 3D reconstruction by addressing a critical limitation: the reliance on noise-free data in existing models. While such sanitized conditions simplify evaluation, they fail to capture the unpredictable, noisy complexities of real-world environments. Dynamic motion, sensor imperfections, and synchronization perturbations lead to sharp performance declines when these models are deployed in practice, revealing an urgent need for frameworks that embrace and excel under real-world noise. To bridge this gap, we tackle three core challenges: scalable data generation, comprehensive benchmarking, and model robustness enhancement. First, we introduce a scalable noisy data synthesis pipeline that generates diverse datasets simulating complex motion, sensor imperfections, and synchronization errors. Second, we leverage this pipeline to create Robust-Ego3D, a benchmark rigorously designed to expose noise-induced performance degradation, highlighting the limitations of current learning-based methods in ego-motion accuracy and 3D reconstruction quality. Third, we propose Correspondence-guided Gaussian Splatting (CorrGS), a novel test-time adaptation method that progressively refines an internal clean 3D representation by aligning noisy observations with rendered RGB-D frames from clean 3D map, enhancing geometric alignment and appearance restoration through visual correspondence. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that CorrGS consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods, particularly in scenarios involving rapid motion and dynamic illumination.