Feature Enhancement of TUM-RGBD Depth Images and Performance Evaluation of Gaussian Splatting-Based SplaTAM Method

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods are used in autonomous systems to determine their locations in unknown environments and map these environments. Autonomous systems need to act autonomously without external intervention. These methods are widely used in robotics and AR/VR applications. Gaussian Splatting SLAM is a Visual SLAM method that performs mapping and localization using depth and RGB images and uses Gaussian structures for scene representation. Popular datasets such as TUM-RGBD, Replica, and Scannet++ are used in the performance evaluation and testing of the visual SLAM methods. However, the depth images in the TUM-RGBD dataset are of lower quality than other datasets. This problem negatively affects the depth data's accuracy and reduces the quality of mapping results. In this study, to increase the quality of depth images, the features of depth images were corrected using the median filter, which is the depth smoothing method, and a cleaner depth dataset was obtained. The new dataset obtained was processed using the Gaussian Splatting SLAM method, and better metric results (PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS) were obtained compared to the original dataset. As a result, in the dataset with corrected features, an improvement of 8.08% in the first scene and 4.69% in the second scene was achieved according to metric values compared to the original dataset.