Polarimetric Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Dense Surface Reconstruction

Monocular 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) SLAM methods demonstrate outstanding performance in rapid dense 3D reconstruction. Yet former methods frequently exhibit suboptimal localization and mapping quality when processing indoor objects characterized by weak textures, dark colors, and high reflectivity (e.g., leather furniture), primarily due to insufficient surface feature information, even with the aid of depth sensors. To overcome these limitations, this work pioneers the integration of polarization information into the 3DGS SLAM framework. Specifically, we introduce a polarization integrated SLAM front-end that leverages the abundant planar features inherent in indoor environments. By incorporating a Chroma Boost mechanism, our approach effectively enhances the spectral multi-view consistency during the SLAM process, while the integration of a Gaussian-visible polarization difference improves the robustness of keyframe registration in low-texture scenarios. We further propose a flattened Gaussian regularization coupled with normal consistency constraints to capture the local geometric features of surfaces more accurately. Moreover, a novel integration of Pol-RGB hierarchical density plane segmentation and multi-scale plane self-constraint substantially enhances the quality of scene surface reconstruction, with further azimuth refinement achieved through the angle of linear polarization (AoLP). Extensive experiments demonstrate that, compared with previous SLAM methods, our approach significantly improves surface reconstruction quality.