Loop Closure from Two Views: Revisiting PGO for Scalable Trajectory Estimation through Monocular Priors

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lim, Tian Yi, Sun, Boyang, Pollefeys, Marc, Blum, Hermann
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lim, Tian Yi
Sun, Boyang
Pollefeys, Marc
Blum, Hermann
author_facet Lim, Tian Yi
Sun, Boyang
Pollefeys, Marc
Blum, Hermann
contents (Visual) Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains a fundamental challenge in enabling autonomous systems to navigate and understand large-scale environments. Traditional SLAM approaches struggle to balance efficiency and accuracy, particularly in large-scale settings where extensive computational resources are required for scene reconstruction and Bundle Adjustment (BA). However, this scene reconstruction, in the form of sparse pointclouds of visual landmarks, is often only used within the SLAM system because navigation and planning methods require different map representations. In this work, we therefore investigate a more scalable Visual SLAM (VSLAM) approach without reconstruction, mainly based on approaches for two-view loop closures. By restricting the map to a sparse keyframed pose graph without dense geometry representations, our `2GO' system achieves efficient optimization with competitive absolute trajectory accuracy. In particular, we find that recent advancements in image matching and monocular depth priors enable very accurate trajectory optimization without BA. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse datasets, including large-scale scenarios, and provide a detailed analysis of the trade-offs between runtime, accuracy, and map size. Our results demonstrate that this streamlined approach supports real-time performance, scales well in map size and trajectory duration, and effectively broadens the capabilities of VSLAM for long-duration deployments to large environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_16275
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Loop Closure from Two Views: Revisiting PGO for Scalable Trajectory Estimation through Monocular Priors
Lim, Tian Yi
Sun, Boyang
Pollefeys, Marc
Blum, Hermann
Robotics
(Visual) Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains a fundamental challenge in enabling autonomous systems to navigate and understand large-scale environments. Traditional SLAM approaches struggle to balance efficiency and accuracy, particularly in large-scale settings where extensive computational resources are required for scene reconstruction and Bundle Adjustment (BA). However, this scene reconstruction, in the form of sparse pointclouds of visual landmarks, is often only used within the SLAM system because navigation and planning methods require different map representations. In this work, we therefore investigate a more scalable Visual SLAM (VSLAM) approach without reconstruction, mainly based on approaches for two-view loop closures. By restricting the map to a sparse keyframed pose graph without dense geometry representations, our `2GO' system achieves efficient optimization with competitive absolute trajectory accuracy. In particular, we find that recent advancements in image matching and monocular depth priors enable very accurate trajectory optimization without BA. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse datasets, including large-scale scenarios, and provide a detailed analysis of the trade-offs between runtime, accuracy, and map size. Our results demonstrate that this streamlined approach supports real-time performance, scales well in map size and trajectory duration, and effectively broadens the capabilities of VSLAM for long-duration deployments to large environments.
title Loop Closure from Two Views: Revisiting PGO for Scalable Trajectory Estimation through Monocular Priors
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16275