Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Thirgood, Christopher, Mendez, Oscar, Ling, Erin, Storey, Jon, Hadfield, Simon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05738
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917353851191296
author Thirgood, Christopher
Mendez, Oscar
Ling, Erin
Storey, Jon
Hadfield, Simon
author_facet Thirgood, Christopher
Mendez, Oscar
Ling, Erin
Storey, Jon
Hadfield, Simon
contents We present a real-time tracking SLAM system that unifies efficient camera tracking with photorealistic feature-enriched mapping using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our main contribution is integrating dense feature rasterization into the novel-view synthesis, aligned with a visual foundation model. This yields strong semantics, going beyond basic RGB-D input, aiding both tracking and mapping accuracy. Unlike previous semantic SLAM approaches (which embed pre-defined class labels) FeatureSLAM enables entirely new downstream tasks via free-viewpoint, open-set segmentation. Across standard benchmarks, our method achieves real-time tracking, on par with state-of-the-art systems while improving tracking stability and map fidelity without prohibitive compute. Quantitatively, we obtain 9\% lower pose error and 8\% higher mapping accuracy compared to recent fixed-set SLAM baselines. Our results confirm that real-time feature-embedded SLAM, is not only valuable for enabling new downstream applications. It also improves the performance of the underlying tracking and mapping subsystems, providing semantic and language masking results that are on-par with offline 3DGS models, alongside state-of-the-art tracking, depth and RGB rendering.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_05738
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FeatureSLAM: Feature-enriched 3D gaussian splatting SLAM in real time
Thirgood, Christopher
Mendez, Oscar
Ling, Erin
Storey, Jon
Hadfield, Simon
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present a real-time tracking SLAM system that unifies efficient camera tracking with photorealistic feature-enriched mapping using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our main contribution is integrating dense feature rasterization into the novel-view synthesis, aligned with a visual foundation model. This yields strong semantics, going beyond basic RGB-D input, aiding both tracking and mapping accuracy. Unlike previous semantic SLAM approaches (which embed pre-defined class labels) FeatureSLAM enables entirely new downstream tasks via free-viewpoint, open-set segmentation. Across standard benchmarks, our method achieves real-time tracking, on par with state-of-the-art systems while improving tracking stability and map fidelity without prohibitive compute. Quantitatively, we obtain 9\% lower pose error and 8\% higher mapping accuracy compared to recent fixed-set SLAM baselines. Our results confirm that real-time feature-embedded SLAM, is not only valuable for enabling new downstream applications. It also improves the performance of the underlying tracking and mapping subsystems, providing semantic and language masking results that are on-par with offline 3DGS models, alongside state-of-the-art tracking, depth and RGB rendering.
title FeatureSLAM: Feature-enriched 3D gaussian splatting SLAM in real time
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05738