KP-SLAM: Joint Flow-Pointmap Prior Synchronization for Robust Consistent Dense Mapping
Monocular RGB dense SLAM remains challenging because depth and global metric scale are not directly observable from a single camera. Existing systems often combine optical-flow and monocular-geometry priors predicted by independently trained networks, which can provide inconsistent constraints to bundle adjustment (BA). Our quantitative prior-consistency analysis indicates that this disagreement is an important contributor to unstable local optimization and reconstruction error rather than the sole cause of drift. We propose KP-SLAM, which predicts dense optical flow and paired pointmap priors from a shared representation and incorporates them into the same BA backend. We further introduce a Depth-Scale-Pose-to-Pointmap (DSPP) objective that relates optimized inverse depth, edge-wise relative scale, and camera pose to paired pointmap constraints. Experiments on ScanNet, TUM-RGBD, KITTI, Tanks-and-Temples, and dynamic sequences show improved tracking, depth, and rendering metrics over the compared RGB-only baselines under the reported settings. The results support the usefulness of synchronized priors while also revealing remaining limitations in highly dynamic, weakly textured, and large-scale scenes.