Passage-Aware Structural Mapping for RGB-D Visual SLAM

Abstract

Doorways and passages are critical structural elements for indoor robot navigation, yet they remain underexplored in modern Visual SLAM (VSLAM) frameworks. This paper presents a passage-aware structural mapping approach for RGB-D VSLAM that detects doors and traversable openings by jointly fusing geometric, semantic, and topological cues. Doors are modeled as planar entities embedded within walls and classified as traversable or non-traversable based on their coplanarity with the supporting wall. Passages are inferred through two complementary strategies: traversal evidence accumulated from camera-wall interactions across consecutive keyframes, and geometric opening validation based on discontinuities in the mapped wall geometry. The proposed method is integrated into vS-Graphs as a proof of concept, enriching its scene graph with passage-level abstractions and improving room connectivity modeling. Qualitative evaluations on indoor office sequences demonstrate reliable doorway detection, and the framework lays the foundation for exploiting these elements in BIM-informed VSLAM. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/snt-arg/visual_sgraphs/tree/doorway_integration.