G2S-ICP SLAM: Geometry-aware Gaussian Splatting ICP SLAM

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel geometry-aware RGB-D Gaussian Splatting SLAM system, named G2S-ICP SLAM. The proposed method performs high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and robust camera pose tracking in real-time by representing each scene element using a Gaussian distribution constrained to the local tangent plane. This effectively models the local surface as a 2D Gaussian disk aligned with the underlying geometry, leading to more consistent depth interpretation across multiple viewpoints compared to conventional 3D ellipsoid-based representations with isotropic uncertainty. To integrate this representation into the SLAM pipeline, we embed the surface-aligned Gaussian disks into a Generalized ICP framework by introducing anisotropic covariance prior without altering the underlying registration formulation. Furthermore we propose a geometry-aware loss that supervises photometric, depth, and normal consistency. Our system achieves real-time operation while preserving both visual and geometric fidelity. Extensive experiments on the Replica and TUM-RGBD datasets demonstrate that G2S-ICP SLAM outperforms prior SLAM systems in terms of localization accuracy, reconstruction completeness, while maintaining the rendering quality.