UE-SLAM: Monocular Neural Radiance Field SLAM with Semantic Mapping Capabilities

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have transformed 3D reconstruction by enabling high-fidelity scene generation from sparse views. However, existing neural SLAM systems face challenges such as limited scene understanding and heavy reliance on depth sensors. We propose UE-SLAM, a real-time monocular SLAM system integrating semantic segmentation, depth fusion, and robust tracking modules. By leveraging the inherent symmetry between semantic segmentation and depth estimation, UE-SLAM utilizes DINOv2 for instance segmentation and combines monocular depth estimation, radiance field-rendered depth, and an uncertainty framework to produce refined proxy depth. This approach enables high-quality semantic mapping and eliminates the need for depth sensors. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that UE-SLAM achieves robust semantic segmentation, detailed scene reconstruction, and accurate tracking, significantly outperforming existing monocular SLAM methods. The modular and symmetrical architecture of UE-SLAM ensures a balance between computational efficiency and reconstruction quality, aligning with the thematic focus of symmetry in engineering and computational systems.