AsyncMDE: Real-Time Monocular Depth Estimation via Asynchronous Spatial Memory

Foundation-model-based monocular depth estimation offers a viable alternative to active sensors for robot perception, yet its computational cost often prohibits deployment on edge platforms. Existing methods perform independent per-frame inference, wasting the substantial computational redundancy between adjacent viewpoints in continuous robot operation. This paper presents AsyncMDE, an asynchronous depth perception system consisting of a foundation model and a lightweight model that amortizes the foundation model's computational cost over time. The foundation model produces high-quality spatial features in the background, while the lightweight model runs asynchronously in the foreground, fusing cached memory with current observations through complementary fusion, outputting depth estimates, and autoregressively updating the memory. This enables cross-frame feature reuse with bounded accuracy degradation. At a mere 3.83M parameters, it operates at 237 FPS on an RTX 4090, recovering 77% of the accuracy gap to the foundation model while achieving a 25X parameter reduction. Validated across indoor static, dynamic, and synthetic extreme-motion benchmarks, AsyncMDE degrades gracefully between refreshes and achieves 161FPS on a Jetson AGX Orin with TensorRT, clearly demonstrating its feasibility for real-time edge deployment.

MonoSLAM: Robust Monocular SLAM with Global Structure Optimization

This paper presents a robust monocular visual SLAM system that simultaneously utilizes point, line, and vanishing point features for accurate camera pose estimation and mapping. To address the critical challenge of achieving reliable localization in low-texture environments, where traditional point-based systems often fail due to insufficient visual features, we introduce a novel approach leveraging Global Primitives structural information to improve the system's robustness and accuracy performance. Our key innovation lies in constructing vanishing points from line features and proposing a weighted fusion strategy to build Global Primitives in the world coordinate system. This strategy associates multiple frames with non-overlapping regions and formulates a multi-frame reprojection error optimization, significantly improving tracking accuracy in texture-scarce scenarios. Evaluations on various datasets show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art methods in trajectory precision, particularly in challenging environments.