MonoEM-GS: Monocular Expectation-Maximization Gaussian Splatting SLAM

arXiv cs.RO / 4/14/2026

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Key Points

  • MonoEM-GS is a monocular SLAM mapping pipeline that uses feed-forward geometric priors from RGB to build a global Gaussian Splatting representation.
  • The method addresses view-dependent/noisy geometry and local metric drift by coupling Gaussian Splatting with an Expectation–Maximization formulation to stabilize reconstruction.
  • For pose estimation, MonoEM-GS employs ICP-based alignment to improve monocular camera motion estimation robustness.
  • It parameterizes Gaussians with multi-modal features, enabling in-place open-set segmentation and other downstream queries directly on the reconstructed map.
  • The approach is evaluated on 7-Scenes, TUM RGB-D, and Replica, with comparisons to recent baselines.

Abstract

Feed-forward geometric foundation models can infer dense point clouds and camera motion directly from RGB streams, providing priors for monocular SLAM. However, their predictions are often view-dependent and noisy: geometry can vary across viewpoints and under image transformations, and local metric properties may drift between frames. We present MonoEM-GS, a monocular mapping pipeline that integrates such geometric predictions into a global Gaussian Splatting representation while explicitly addressing these inconsistencies. MonoEM-GS couples Gaussian Splatting with an Expectation--Maximization formulation to stabilize geometry, and employs ICP-based alignment for monocular pose estimation. Beyond geometry, MonoEM-GS parameterizes Gaussians with multi-modal features, enabling in-place open-set segmentation and other downstream queries directly on the reconstructed map. We evaluate MonoEM-GS on 7-Scenes, TUM RGB-D and Replica, and compare against recent baselines.