A Comparison of Monocular Visual SLAM and Visual Odometry Methods Applied to 3D Reconstruction Herrera-Granda, Erick P. Torres Cantero, Juan Carlos Rosales, Andrés Peluffo-Ordóñez, Diego Hernán Monocular 3D reconstruction Monocular SLAM comparison Monocular VO comparison Monocular benchmark 3D reconstruction classification This work was supported by the SDAS Research Group (www.sdas-group.com accessed on 16 June 2023). Pure monocular 3D reconstruction is a complex problem that has attracted the research community's interest due to the affordability and availability of RGB sensors. SLAM, VO, and SFM are disciplines formulated to solve the 3D reconstruction problem and estimate the camera's ego-motion; so, many methods have been proposed. However, most of these methods have not been evaluated on large datasets and under various motion patterns, have not been tested under the same metrics, and most of them have not been evaluated following a taxonomy, making their comparison and selection difficult. In this research, we performed a comparison of ten publicly available SLAM and VO methods following a taxonomy, including one method for each category of the primary taxonomy, three machine-learning-based methods, and two updates of the best methods to identify the advantages and limitations of each category of the taxonomy and test whether the addition of machine learning or updates on those methods improved them significantly. Thus, we evaluated each algorithm using the TUM-Mono dataset and benchmark, and we performed an inferential statistical analysis to identify the significant differences through its metrics. The results determined that the sparse-direct methods significantly outperformed the rest of the taxonomy, and fusing them with machine learning techniques significantly enhanced the geometric-based methods' performance from different perspectives. 2023-09-20T10:26:21Z 2023-09-20T10:26:21Z 2023-07-31 journal article Herrera-Granda, E.P.; Torres-Cantero, J.C.; Rosales, A.; Peluffo-Ordóñez, D.H. A Comparison of Monocular Visual SLAM and Visual Odometry Methods Applied to 3D Reconstruction. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 8837. [https://doi.org/10.3390/app13158837] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/84524 10.3390/app13158837 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional MDPI