DROID-Splat

Combining dense end-to-end SLAM with dense 3D Gaussian Splatting.

SotA results for monocular video by integrating depth of an unknown scale!

🎬 Introduction

This is a deep-learning-based dense visual SLAM framework that achieves real-time global optimization of poses and 3D reconstruction.

• SotA Tracking from DROID-SLAM
• Integration of monocular depth estimation priors like Metric3D
• Dense differentiable Rendering with 3D Gaussian Splatting
• We also support the optimization kernel from DroidCalib, which supports arbitrary camera models and optimizes the camera intrinsics on top of the map and pose graph.

📢 Update

We added the mcmc branch, which treats Gaussian Splatting as Markov Chain Monte Carlo and therefore has an improved densification & pruning strategy. In order to use this, simply clone the mcmc-branch and proceed with the install as usual (Our install now features one additional submodule). The rasterizer still supports pose gradient computation. We observed consistent gains in our experiments over vanilla 3D Gaussian Splatting. We will add the 2D Gaussian Splatting branch in the upcoming weeks.

📝 Code

You can create an anaconda environment called droidsplat. For linux, you need to install libopenexr-dev before creating the environment.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/ChenHoy/DROID-Splat.git
cd DROID-Splat

sudo apt-get install libopenexr-dev
    
conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda activate droidsplat

python setup.py install

Grab a coffee ☕, because this will take a while (~15 min.).

CUDA

We recommend to use a higher version of CUDA > 12.1. We observe an nvcc bug in 12.1, which is resolved by changing

-    return caster.operator typename make_caster<T>::template cast_op_type<T>();
+    return caster;

in line 45 of torch/include/pybind11/cast.h, see issue.

We recommend to create a separate virtual environment for depth inference, see their respective repositories.

❓ How to use this framework?

We support multiple input modes in our paper: 🌑 mono, 🌓 prgbd, 🌕 rgbd.

P-RGBD refers to Pseudo-RGBD, where we use a monocular depth prediction from an off-the-shelf network
like Metric3D, ZoeDepth or DepthAnything.

Basic inference can be run with

python run.py data=Replica.base data.input_folder=/media/data/Replica/office0 tracking=base stride=1 mode=rgbd

Our configuration system is based on Hydra, which allows elegant command line manipulation. Since our system is quite complex, we are showing a few basic use cases below. Feel free to dig into the /configs/... files to see options for each component!

Setting up a dataset

We assume a very basic structure for your own dataset:

My Dataset
├── images
│   ├── frame_0001.png
│   ├── frame_0002.png
│   ├── frame_0003.png
|   ...
│   └── frame_1000.png
├── metric3d-vit_giant2
│   ├── frame_0001.npy
│   ├── frame_0002.npy
│   ├── frame_0003.npy
|   ...
│   └── frame_1000.npy
├── depth
│   ├── frame_0001.png
│   ├── frame_0002.png
│   ├── frame_0003.png
|   ...
│   └── frame_1000.png
└── raw.mp4

Monocular depth inference can be run by using the demo.py scripts in the respective forks.

⚡ Multi-threading

We run multiple components in parallel based on concurrency.

• All threads follow the leading Frontend.
• The Loop Detector will check visual similarity to past frames for each incoming frame.
• How often the Backend and Renderer are run is determined by backend_every and mapper_every.

We synchronize the threads, such that the Backend truly runs in parallel, but the Frontend will wait until a Rendering pass is finished.
This sacrifices a few FPS for additional stability/robustness.

♦️ How to configure your Tracker

Our Tracker consists of three components:

• $\color{BurntOrange}{\textbf{Frontend}}$
• $\color{BurntOrange}{\textbf{Backend}}$
• $\color{BurntOrange}{\textbf{Loop Detector}}$.

They can be disabled with run_backend=False, run_loop_detection=False.

The system can be modified flexibly. Example:

Optimize the scales of a depth prior in 🌓 prgbd mode by using tracking.frontend.optimize_scales=True

🤞 Tips & Tricks

The most important properties of the Tracker are how to build and maintain the $\color{BurntOrange}{\textbf{Factor Graph}}$:

• The motion threshold and keyframe thresholds determine when keyframes are considered and kept: tracking.motion_filter.thresh, tracking.frontend.keyframe_thresh and tracking.frontend.thresh
• Factors are only kept in the optimization window for a tracking.frontend.max_age. If the Frontend is not accurate, increasing this age will usually increase the window at the cost of memory and speed.
• Limiting the number of factors determines how big the global backend optimization will finally be tracking.backend.max_factor_mult, tracking.backend.window

When we use the $\color{BurntOrange}{\textbf{Loop Detector}}$ to detect visually similar frames, we add these edges in addition to our global backend optimization.

• We also support the loop closure updates from GO-SLAM with tracking.backend.use_loop_closure. However, we could not achieve better results with this. We can also not confirm, that it is trivial to add more edges to the graph without affecting the optimization.

♣️ How to use the Renderer

There are few very important parameters, that need to be tuned in order to achieve good performance:

• $\color{Purple}{\textbf{Optimization}}$ time and optimization window: mapping.online_opt.iters, mapping.online_opt.n_last_frames, mapping.online_opt.n_rand_frames. We recommend large batch sizes with a decent number of random frames for optimal results. The number of iterations can be set in accordance to the run_mapper_every-frequency. We made the experience, that it is easier to run the Renderer with a lower frequency, but optimize for longer. Be careful to additionally change mapping.opt_params.position_lr_max_steps, which determines the learning rate scheduler.
• $\color{Purple}{\textbf{Filtering}}$ the Tracker map before feeding the Renderer: mapping.online_opt.filter.bin_th. This filter can perform a multiview-consistency check to remove inconsistent 3D points or remove uncertain pixels, determined by the neural network. Additionally it is very important to use an appropriate downsampling factor: mapping.input.pcd_downsample, mapping.input.pcd_downsample_init. Depending on how aggressive we filter and how we grow Gaussians, we can determine the final number of Gaussians in a scene. We made the experience, that sometimes less Gaussians means better results and usually aim for ~200 - 300k Gaussians in complex indoor scenes. PS: If you are not careful, the system can OOM.
• How to $\color{Purple}{\textbf{grow and prune}}$ Gaussians: mapping.online_opt.densify.vanilla describes the parameters of the original 3D Gaussian Splatting strategy. mapping.online_opt.pruning can be used for Covisibility based pruning used in MonoGS
• $\color{Purple}{\textbf{Refinement}}$: Our online mode can already achieve strong results at decent FPS. If you want more, you can always refine the map once the Tracker is finished with mapping.refinement. We already achieve strong results with just 500 refinement iterations.

🎥 Visualization

You can inspect the system in three ways:

• Visualize the input stream and pose confidence: show_stream=True, plot_uncertainty=True. This shows the data in an opencv stream.
• Visualize the Tracking system: run_visualization=True. This is the native Open3D Visualizer from DROID-SLAM.
• Visualize Renderer: run_mapping_gui=True. This is the Open3D Visualizer from MonoGS.

We dont recommend to run these all at once.

🌄 In-the-wild inference

We support $\color{Pink}{\textbf{Camera Calibration}}$, explored in DroidCalib for videos with unknown intrinsics. This allows you to run on any cell phone video. You can activate it with opt_intr=True. If no camera intrinsics are provided in configs/data/Dataset/data.yaml, then we use a heuristic according to the image dimensions. Given enough diverse motion in the scene, this already allows to converge to correct intrinsics.

However, since this is much easier in 🌕 rgbd mode, we recommend to use monocular depth predictions on in-the-wild video. Using the scale-optimization together with intrinsics will result in degenerate solutions. Therefore, similar to other papers RobustDynaNeRF, we recommend a two-stage strategy:

1. Run the system $\color{Pink}{\textbf{without scale-optimization}}$ in 🌓 prgbd mode: python run.py tracking=base stride=1 mode=rgbd opt_intr=True tracking.frontend.optimize_scales=False.
   This will return converged intrinsics. When using the Metric3D predictions, the results can even be scale-accurate!
2. Update the intrinsics and run the whole system in 🌓 prgbd mode $\color{Pink}{\textbf{with scale-optimization}}$.

💡 Advice

• It is useful to first run the Tracking without Mapping, to see if the scene is correctly reconstructed. The Tracker is very robust, but failures can still happen.
• There is a large difference between indoor and outdoor scenes. While you dont have to be careful in indoor scenes with the depth supervision and map initialization, outdoor scenes introduce many floaters and have much larger depth variance.

📷 Non-linear Camera models

• Default Splatting only supports a pinhole camera model. We rectify images from non-linear camera models in our data pipeline.
• We did not experiment with calibration of other models, so you might need to tweak the code

Replica

Download the data from Google Drive and adjust the input in the configs/Replica.base.yaml

TUM-RGBD

Download the data from TUM and adjust the input path in the configs/TUM_RGBD/base.yaml.

📈 Evaluation

You can evaluate by running

bash scripts/evaluation/evaluate_on_tum.sh mode name_experiment

where mode can be either mono, prgbd or rgbd. When evaluate=True, the results will be automatically stored in the experiment subfolders of a scene.

Acknowledgments

We are standing on the shoulder of giants and would like to thank all the people, who have open-sourced their Code!

• "DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras, Teed etl. al" Neurips 2021
• "GO-SLAM: Global Optimization for Consistent 3D Instant Reconstruction, Zhang et al", ICCV 2023
• "Deep geometry-aware camera self-calibration from video, Hagemann et al", ICCV 2023
• "Gaussian Splatting SLAM, Matsuki et al", CVPR 2024
• "GLORIE-SLAM: Globally Optimized RGB-only Implicit Encoding Point Cloud SLAM, Zhang et al.", Glorie-SLAM

Concurrent Work

We would like to acknowledge other works, who had the same idea and apparently blindsided us. Concurrent work Splat-SLAM is a similar system, that combines DROID-SLAM and Gaussian Splatting. We would like to note, that we released this code earlier with its entire history to proof that we did not intend to copy their work. Some notable differences, that we observed after careful reading of their paper:

• We support additional camera calibration with unknown intrinsics, which allows inference on in-the-wild video
• We compare multiple different techniques on top of 3D Gaussian Splatting, e.g. notable MCMC Gaussian Splatting or 2D Gaussian Splatting
• We use EigenPlaces ICCV 2023 to compute visual similarity between frames in our factor graph. We then store these features in a FAISS database to find nearest neighbors and loop candidates. We would like to highlight, that at least on TUM RGBD and Replica we did not find a big improvement when adding these additional loop candidate edges to the factor graph. They seem to handle loop closures similar to GO-SLAM, where candidates are found from apparent motion.
• We keep the keyframe management from DROID-SLAM based on apparent motion. They seemed to have more success by using the covisibility criterion from MonoGS
• We simply reanchor the Gaussians when a significant map update from the Tracker happens, they seem to have a more involved strategy.
• We only account for scale changes of the monocular prior in our Gaussians by reoptimization. Since the map is usually already stable when initializing Gaussians, we never have seen a problem with this. When a large scale update on in-the-wild video happens, we had success by simply recording the depth change and shrinking/enlarging the Gaussian Point Cloud.

How to cite

If you find this work relevant, please cite us with

@misc{homeyer2024droid,
  title={DROID-Splat: Combining end-to-end SLAM with 3D Gaussian Splatting},
  author={Homeyer, Christian, Begiristain, Leon and Schnoerr, Christoph},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.17660},
  year={2024}
}

References

@misc{teed2021droid,
  title={Droid-slam: Deep visual slam for monocular, stereo, and rgb-d cameras},
  author={Teed, Zachary and Deng, Jia},
  journal={Advances in neural information processing systems},
  volume={34},
  pages={16558--16569},
  year={2021}
}

@inproceedings{zhang2023goslam,
    author    = {Zhang, Youmin and Tosi, Fabio and Mattoccia, Stefano and Poggi, Matteo},
    title     = {GO-SLAM: Global Optimization for Consistent 3D Instant Reconstruction},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month     = {October},
    year      = {2023},
}

@inproceedings{hagemann2023deep,
  title={Deep geometry-aware camera self-calibration from video},
  author={Hagemann, Annika and Knorr, Moritz and Stiller, Christoph},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision},
  pages={3438--3448},
  year={2023}
}

@misc{matsuki2024gaussian,
      title={Gaussian Splatting SLAM}, 
      author={Hidenobu Matsuki and Riku Murai and Paul H. J. Kelly and Andrew J. Davison},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2312.06741},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV}
}

@misc{zhang2024glorie,
  title={Glorie-slam: Globally optimized rgb-only implicit encoding point cloud slam},
  author={Zhang, Ganlin and Sandstr{\"o}m, Erik and Zhang, Youmin and Patel, Manthan and Van Gool, Luc and Oswald, Martin R},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.19549},
  year={2024}

}

@misc{sandstrom2024splat,
  title={Splat-SLAM: Globally Optimized RGB-only SLAM with 3D Gaussians},
  author={Sandstr{\"o}m, Erik and Tateno, Keisuke and Oechsle, Michael and Niemeyer, Michael and Van Gool, Luc and Oswald, Martin R and Tombari, Federico},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.16544},
  year={2024}
}