LV-GS SLAM: A Decoupled LiDAR–Visual 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM in a Large-Scale Environment

Abstract

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has gained prominence in autonomous driving and robotics for its rendering efficiency and high-fidelity reconstruction capabilities. However, incremental 3DGS map construction at large scales remains challenging due to sensor sparsity and computational constraints. In this paper, we propose LV-GS SLAM, a novel system that integrates LiDAR and visual data for incremental, large-scale reconstruction with real-time tracking. This system provides fast and robust pose estimation while also enabling photorealistic rendering. We first employ a LiDAR odometry frontend that processes 30 Hz LiDAR inputs to provide robust initial poses. In our implementation, the complete LiDAR tracking pipeline runs at 15–19 Hz, while the mapping module performs incremental optimization on selected keyframes. To address the sparsity-induced surface discontinuity in conventional LiDAR-based reconstruction, we propose a novel depth propagation approach that initializes 3D Gaussian primitives using dense depth maps, achieving faster PSNR convergence with 9× fewer optimization iterations compared to direct LiDAR initialization. Furthermore, we develop a keyframe-based submap management framework that dynamically adjusts memory allocation based on both primitive density and inter-frame overlap ratio, effectively preventing GPU memory overflow. Our system has been validated on the KITTI dataset, achieving superior rendering quality compared with representative reproducible baselines. We further validate the robustness of the system on a quadruped robot platform, demonstrating satisfactory performance in both pose estimation and high-fidelity reconstruction.