In recent decades, visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) has
gained significant interest in both academia and industry. It estimates camera
motion and reconstructs the environment concurrently using visual sensors on a
moving robot. However, conventional cameras are limited by hardware, including
motion blur and low dynamic range, which can negatively impact performance in
challenging scenarios like high-speed motion and high dynamic range
illumination. Recent studies have demonstrated that event cameras, a new type
of bio-inspired visual sensor, offer advantages such as high temporal
resolution, dynamic range, low power consumption, and low latency. This paper
presents a timely and comprehensive review of event-based vSLAM algorithms that
exploit the benefits of asynchronous and irregular event streams for
localization and mapping tasks. The review covers the working principle of
event cameras and various event representations for preprocessing event data.
It also categorizes event-based vSLAM methods into four main categories:
feature-based, direct, motion-compensation, and deep learning methods, with
detailed discussions and practical guidance for each approach. Furthermore, the
paper evaluates the state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks,
highlighting current challenges and future opportunities in this emerging
research area. A public repository will be maintained to keep track of the
rapid developments in this field at
{https://github.com/kun150kun/ESLAM-survey}.

本文综述了基于事件相机的 vSLAM 算法，介绍了事件相机及其预处理的事件数据的各种事件表示方法，并将基于事件相机的 vSLAM 方法分为四类，包括基于特征的、基于直接法的、基于运动补偿的和深度学习的方法，并对每种方法进行了详细的讨论和实用指导。此外，该文对各类方法在不同基准测试中的表现进行了评估，突出了当前这一新兴研究领域面临的挑战和未来的机遇。