A Unified Framework for Mutual Improvement of SLAM and Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents a novel framework for simultaneously implementing localization and segmentation, which are two of the most important vision-based tasks for robotics. While the goals and techniques used for them were considered to be different previously, we show that by making use of the intermediate results of the two modules, their performance can be enhanced at the same time. Our framework is able to handle both the instantaneous motion and long-term changes of instances in localization with the help of the segmentation result, which also benefits from the refined 3D pose information. We conduct experiments on various datasets, and prove that our framework works effectively on improving the precision and robustness of the two tasks and outperforms existing localization and segmentation algorithms.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures.This work has been accepted by ICRA 2019. The demo video can be found at https://youtu.be/Bkt53dAehj

Learning to Segment Dynamic Objects using SLAM Outliers

We present a method to automatically learn to segment dynamic objects using SLAM outliers. It requires only one monocular sequence per dynamic object for training and consists in localizing dynamic objects using SLAM outliers, creating their masks, and using these masks to train a semantic segmentation network. We integrate the trained network in ORB-SLAM 2 and LDSO. At runtime we remove features on dynamic objects, making the SLAM unaffected by them. We also propose a new stereo dataset and new metrics to evaluate SLAM robustness. Our dataset includes consensus inversions, i.e., situations where the SLAM uses more features on dynamic objects that on the static background. Consensus inversions are challenging for SLAM as they may cause major SLAM failures. Our approach performs better than the State-of-the-Art on the TUM RGB-D dataset in monocular mode and on our dataset in both monocular and stereo modes.Comment: Accepted to ICPR 202