LST-SLAM: A Stereo Thermal SLAM System for Kilometer-Scale Dynamic Environments

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20925v1
• Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:04:54 GMT
• Title: LST-SLAM: A Stereo Thermal SLAM System for Kilometer-Scale Dynamic Environments
• Authors: Zeyu Jiang, Kuan Xu, Changhao Chen,
• Abstract summary: LST-SLAM is a novel large-scale stereo thermal SLAM system that achieves robust performance in complex, dynamic scenes.<n>Our approach combines self-supervised thermal feature learning, stereo dual-level motion tracking, and geometric pose optimization.<n>Experiments on kilometer-scale dynamic thermal datasets show that LST-SLAM significantly outperforms recent representative SLAM systems.
• Score: 9.986292956956953
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Thermal cameras offer strong potential for robot perception under challenging illumination and weather conditions. However, thermal Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains difficult due to unreliable feature extraction, unstable motion tracking, and inconsistent global pose and map construction, particularly in dynamic large-scale outdoor environments. To address these challenges, we propose LST-SLAM, a novel large-scale stereo thermal SLAM system that achieves robust performance in complex, dynamic scenes. Our approach combines self-supervised thermal feature learning, stereo dual-level motion tracking, and geometric pose optimization. We also introduce a semantic-geometric hybrid constraint that suppresses potentially dynamic features lacking strong inter-frame geometric consistency. Furthermore, we develop an online incremental bag-of-words model for loop closure detection, coupled with global pose optimization to mitigate accumulated drift. Extensive experiments on kilometer-scale dynamic thermal datasets show that LST-SLAM significantly outperforms recent representative SLAM systems, including AirSLAM and DROID-SLAM, in both robustness and accuracy.

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