GLidE-SLAM: GL-Accelerated Indirect-Direct Embedded SLAM

Abstract

With the growing demand for robotics, autonomous drones, and wearable extended reality systems, the deployment of Visual SLAM on embedded devices remains challenging. Tracking must sustain high frame rates while preserving compute resources for map extension and maintenance. This paper presents GLidE-SLAM, a monocular hybrid indirect-direct framework that addresses this by architectural separation: the system performs GPU-accelerated direct tracking on intermediate frames, while reserving the full indirect pipeline for map extension and global consistency. We leverage highly parallel image-alignment operations for pose-only estimation without depth optimization or map point creation, making the workload suitable for GPU offloading and freeing CPU resources for backend tasks. We implement the direct tracker using vendor-agnostic OpenGL ES~3.1 compute shaders, enabling deployment across a broader range of commodity embedded platforms without requiring CUDA support. To our knowledge, this is the first complete direct photometric pose estimator realized via compute shaders for embedded-class devices. Experiments on target platforms demonstrate up to 9$\times$ higher frame rates than the CPU-only baseline while maintaining trajectory accuracy and improving practical deployment across commodity resource-constrained hardware.