PINGS: Gaussian Splatting Meets Distance Fields within a Point-Based Implicit Neural Map

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pan, Yue, Zhong, Xingguang, Jin, Liren, Wiesmann, Louis, Popović, Marija, Behley, Jens, Stachniss, Cyrill
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pan, Yue
Zhong, Xingguang
Jin, Liren
Wiesmann, Louis
Popović, Marija
Behley, Jens
Stachniss, Cyrill
author_facet Pan, Yue
Zhong, Xingguang
Jin, Liren
Wiesmann, Louis
Popović, Marija
Behley, Jens
Stachniss, Cyrill
contents Robots benefit from high-fidelity reconstructions of their environment, which should be geometrically accurate and photorealistic to support downstream tasks. While this can be achieved by building distance fields from range sensors and radiance fields from cameras, realising scalable incremental mapping of both fields consistently and at the same time with high quality is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel map representation that unifies a continuous signed distance field and a Gaussian splatting radiance field within an elastic and compact point-based implicit neural map. By enforcing geometric consistency between these fields, we achieve mutual improvements by exploiting both modalities. We present a novel LiDAR-visual SLAM system called PINGS using the proposed map representation and evaluate it on several challenging large-scale datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that PINGS can incrementally build globally consistent distance and radiance fields encoded with a compact set of neural points. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, PINGS achieves superior photometric and geometric rendering at novel views by constraining the radiance field with the distance field. Furthermore, by utilizing dense photometric cues and multi-view consistency from the radiance field, PINGS produces more accurate distance fields, leading to improved odometry estimation and mesh reconstruction. We also provide an open-source implementation of PING at: https://github.com/PRBonn/PINGS.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05752
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PINGS: Gaussian Splatting Meets Distance Fields within a Point-Based Implicit Neural Map
Pan, Yue
Zhong, Xingguang
Jin, Liren
Wiesmann, Louis
Popović, Marija
Behley, Jens
Stachniss, Cyrill
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
Robots benefit from high-fidelity reconstructions of their environment, which should be geometrically accurate and photorealistic to support downstream tasks. While this can be achieved by building distance fields from range sensors and radiance fields from cameras, realising scalable incremental mapping of both fields consistently and at the same time with high quality is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel map representation that unifies a continuous signed distance field and a Gaussian splatting radiance field within an elastic and compact point-based implicit neural map. By enforcing geometric consistency between these fields, we achieve mutual improvements by exploiting both modalities. We present a novel LiDAR-visual SLAM system called PINGS using the proposed map representation and evaluate it on several challenging large-scale datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that PINGS can incrementally build globally consistent distance and radiance fields encoded with a compact set of neural points. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, PINGS achieves superior photometric and geometric rendering at novel views by constraining the radiance field with the distance field. Furthermore, by utilizing dense photometric cues and multi-view consistency from the radiance field, PINGS produces more accurate distance fields, leading to improved odometry estimation and mesh reconstruction. We also provide an open-source implementation of PING at: https://github.com/PRBonn/PINGS.
title PINGS: Gaussian Splatting Meets Distance Fields within a Point-Based Implicit Neural Map
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05752