AERGS-SLAM: Auto-Exposure-Robust Stereo 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a revolutionary scene representation in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) research. However, existing research on 3DGS-based SLAM fails to accurately address the appearance variations induced by camera auto-exposure in prevalent real-world scenarios, resulting in reduced localization and photorealistic mapping accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a stereo auto-exposure-robust Gaussian splatting SLAM (AERGS-SLAM), a framework robust to such variations and enables both reliable localization and exposure-controlled photorealistic mapping. Our key contributions are two fold. Firstly, we propose a camera exposure network to model the camera exposure process, which we integrate with Gaussian splatting to achieve exposure-controlled novel view synthesis. Secondly, we exploit an illumination-robust geometric feature for localization and Gaussian map initialization, enhancing localization accuracy under exposure-varying scenarios. Extensive experiments on public datasets and our self-collected real-world dataset demonstrate that AERGS-SLAM outperforms baselines in both localization performance and photorealistic mapping quality.