Geometry-Aware Online Mapping for 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM

[2608.14902] Geometry-Aware Online Mapping for 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Search arXiv Press Enter to search · Advanced search Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2608.14902 (cs) [Submitted on 14 Aug 2026] Title: Geometry-Aware Online Mapping for 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM Authors: Thai Luu , Quan Tran , Hieu Phan , Tuan Dang View a PDF of the paper titled Geometry-Aware Online Mapping for 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM, by Thai Luu and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has enabled efficient photorealistic view synthesis and is rapidly being adopted in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems for online mapping. In these systems, a Gaussian map must be expanded and refined incrementally while tracking runs in real time, so initialization and density control directly determine where limited computation and iterations are spent. This contrasts with offline 3DGS reconstruction, where such heuristics can be amortized over long optimization schedules. However, most 3DGS-SLAM pipelines inherit initialization and density-control heuristics from offline reconstruction, which can become brittle under the strict per-keyframe optimization budgets and incremental map growth of online SLAM. In this work, we revisit these heuristics in a decoupled 3DGS-SLAM setting and propose three geometry-aware methods that operate in the mapping thread: transmittance-preserving densification, camera-aware scale initialization from depth and intrinsics, and error-guided densification that focuses new primitives on high-residual regions. Our results show consistent improvements in rendering quality with negligible overhead, highlighting the coupling between photometric residuals and pose uncertainty in online SLAM. We will open-source our code to the community to foster growth and validate reproducibility. Subjects: Robotics (cs.RO) Cite as: arXiv:2608.14902 [cs.RO] (or arXiv:2608.14902v1 [cs.RO] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14902 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Journal reference: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026) Submission history From: Tuan Dang [ view email ] [v1] Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:20:16 UTC (2,366 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Geometry-Aware Online Mapping for 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM, by Thai Luu and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.RO < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs . Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax ( What is MathJax? ) We gratefully acknowledge support from our major funders , member institutions , , and all contributors. About · Help · Contact · Subscribe · Copyright · Privacy · Accessibility · Operational Status (opens in new tab) Major funding support from

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