Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2026, Vol. 55 ›› Issue (7): 1266-1277.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2026.20260050

• Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing • Previous Articles    

An adaptive-pruning 3D Gaussian SLAM method for real-time high-fidelity indoor scene modeling

Jun Gong1(), Jianjun Luo1, Shengnan Ke1, Shibin Li2, Weicong Chen2, Le Qin1, Shengjun Tang2()   

  1. 1.School of Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang 330022, China
    2.School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
  • Received:2026-02-02 Revised:2026-06-23 Published:2026-08-18
  • Contact: Shengjun Tang E-mail:gongjunbox@163.com;shengjuntang@szu.edu.cn
  • About author:Gong Jun (1978—), male, PhD, professor, majors in 3D city modeling. E-mail: gongjunbox@163.com
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China(42471442; 62261029; 12563011);Research Project of Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province(2024A1515030061);Research Project of Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Committee(KJZD20230923115508017);Research Project of State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Building and Urban Science(2023ZB18);Youth Science and Technology Talent Support Programme of Guangdong Provincial Association for Science and Technology (GDSTA)(SKXRC2026858);Research and Development Project of China Railway(N2024S008)

Abstract:

In recent years, robotics and augmented reality (AR) applications have imposed increasingly stringent requirements on the real-time performance and interpretability of dense SLAM. As an explicit 3D scene representation, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) combines fast rendering with structural interpretability and has emerged as a promising direction for high-quality mapping. However, existing 3DGS-SLAM systems still struggle to simultaneously achieve high reconstruction accuracy and real-time efficiency in online mapping, mainly due to the lack of adaptive control over the number of Gaussian primitives. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive-pruning 3D Gaussian SLAM method for real-time, high-fidelity modeling. The proposed approach explicitly incorporates a “map scale/Gaussian budget” term into the mapping optimization objective and introduces a score-driven Gaussian management mechanism. Specifically, during optimization, multi-view photometric consistency residuals, occlusion awareness, and viewpoint coverage are jointly leveraged to online estimate the contribution of each Gaussian to geometric consistency and appearance fidelity. Based on these scores, adaptive densification and priority-based pruning are performed in a unified manner to dynamically regulate model complexity. In addition, a learnable mask coupled with a sparsity regularization term is introduced to promote the adaptive contraction of the effective Gaussian set, thereby reducing GPU memory usage and rendering overhead. Experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method maintains stable reconstruction quality even at an approximately 65% pruning ratio, while substantially reducing computational and storage costs. These results indicate that the proposed approach improves online mapping efficiency without compromising map visualization quality, providing an effective scale-adaptive control scheme for real-time, high-fidelity 3DGS-SLAM mapping.

Key words: 3DGS, SLAM, real-time mapping, adaptive pruning, visualization

CLC Number: