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gaoxiang12/slambook-en
The English version of 14 lectures on visual SLAM.
This is the LaTeX source (plus a pre-built PDF) for the English translation of '14 Lectures on Visual SLAM,' a widely-used Chinese robotics textbook covering the full visual SLAM pipeline from camera models through backend optimization and loop closure. It's for people learning SLAM theory who want a free, complete textbook rather than scattered blog posts or paper skimming.
You get both the compiled PDF and the full LaTeX source, so you can see exactly how the math and figures were built, rebuild your own copy, or fork it for personal notes. Coverage is genuinely end-to-end: camera models, Lie groups/manifold optimization, bundle adjustment backend, loop closure, and dense mapping, not just one narrow topic. It pairs with a separate companion code repo (slambook2), so the theory chapters have runnable exercises behind them instead of being a standalone wall of text.
This repo is text only — any actual code lives in a second repo you have to clone separately, which is an odd split if you just want to run the examples. The translation was finished in 2021 and recent pushes are just maintenance (fonts, minor fixes), so there's no coverage of anything that's moved SLAM forward since then, like visual-inertial or learning-based front ends. Building it yourself is a headache: compiling the Chinese chapters needs specific CJK fonts installed plus xelatex, and the leftover TODO_Review.md in the tree suggests parts of the translation review were never closed out. There's no CI validating that the committed PDF actually matches the LaTeX source at HEAD, so you're trusting an unverified build artifact.