Dense Piecewise Planar RGB-D SLAM for Indoor Environments

The paper exploits weak Manhattan constraints to parse the structure of indoor environments from RGB-D video sequences in an online setting. We extend the previous approach for single view parsing of indoor scenes to video sequences and formulate the problem of recovering the floor plan of the environment as an optimal labeling problem solved using dynamic programming. The temporal continuity is enforced in a recursive setting, where labeling from previous frames is used as a prior term in the objective function. In addition to recovery of piecewise planar weak Manhattan structure of the extended environment, the orthogonality constraints are also exploited by visual odometry and pose graph optimization. This yields reliable estimates in the presence of large motions and absence of distinctive features to track. We evaluate our method on several challenging indoors sequences demonstrating accurate SLAM and dense mapping of low texture environments. On existing TUM benchmark we achieve competitive results with the alternative approaches which fail in our environments.Comment: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 201

TT-SLAM: Dense Monocular SLAM for Planar Environments

International audienceThis paper proposes a novel visual SLAM method with dense planar reconstruction using a monocular camera: TT-SLAM. The method exploits planar template-based trackers (TT) to compute camera poses and reconstructs a multiplanar scene representation. Multiple homographies are estimated simultaneously by clustering a set of template trackers supported by superpixelized regions. Compared to RANSACbased multiple homographies method [1], data association and keyframe selection issues are handled by the continuous nature of template trackers. A non-linear optimization process is applied to all the homographies to improve the precision in pose estimation. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms RANSAC-based multiple homographies method [1] as well as other dense method SLAM techniques such as LSD-SLAM or DPPTAM, and competes with keypointbased techniques like ORB-SLAM while providing dense planar reconstructions of the environment

Keyframe-based monocular SLAM: design, survey, and future directions

Extensive research in the field of monocular SLAM for the past fifteen years has yielded workable systems that found their way into various applications in robotics and augmented reality. Although filter-based monocular SLAM systems were common at some time, the more efficient keyframe-based solutions are becoming the de facto methodology for building a monocular SLAM system. The objective of this paper is threefold: first, the paper serves as a guideline for people seeking to design their own monocular SLAM according to specific environmental constraints. Second, it presents a survey that covers the various keyframe-based monocular SLAM systems in the literature, detailing the components of their implementation, and critically assessing the specific strategies made in each proposed solution. Third, the paper provides insight into the direction of future research in this field, to address the major limitations still facing monocular SLAM; namely, in the issues of illumination changes, initialization, highly dynamic motion, poorly textured scenes, repetitive textures, map maintenance, and failure recovery

Compute-Bound and Low-Bandwidth Distributed 3D Graph-SLAM

This article describes a new approach for distributed 3D SLAM map building. The key contribution of this article is the creation of a distributed graph-SLAM map-building architecture responsive to bandwidth and computational needs of the robotic platform. Responsiveness is afforded by the integration of a 3D point cloud to plane cloud compression algorithm that approximates dense 3D point cloud using local planar patches. Compute bound platforms may restrict the computational duration of the compression algorithm and low-bandwidth platforms can restrict the size of the compression result. The backbone of the approach is an ultra-fast adaptive 3D compression algorithm that transforms swaths of 3D planar surface data into planar patches attributed with image textures. Our approach uses DVO SLAM, a leading algorithm for 3D mapping, and extends it by computationally isolating map integration tasks from local Guidance, Navigation, and Control tasks and includes an addition of a network protocol to share the compressed plane clouds. The joint effect of these contributions allows agents with 3D sensing capabilities to calculate and communicate compressed map information commensurate with their onboard computational resources and communication channel capacities. This opens SLAM mapping to new categories of robotic platforms that may have computational and memory limits that prohibit other SLAM solutions

Fine-To-Coarse Global Registration of RGB-D Scans

RGB-D scanning of indoor environments is important for many applications, including real estate, interior design, and virtual reality. However, it is still challenging to register RGB-D images from a hand-held camera over a long video sequence into a globally consistent 3D model. Current methods often can lose tracking or drift and thus fail to reconstruct salient structures in large environments (e.g., parallel walls in different rooms). To address this problem, we propose a "fine-to-coarse" global registration algorithm that leverages robust registrations at finer scales to seed detection and enforcement of new correspondence and structural constraints at coarser scales. To test global registration algorithms, we provide a benchmark with 10,401 manually-clicked point correspondences in 25 scenes from the SUN3D dataset. During experiments with this benchmark, we find that our fine-to-coarse algorithm registers long RGB-D sequences better than previous methods

Pop-up SLAM: Semantic Monocular Plane SLAM for Low-texture Environments

Existing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms are not robust in challenging low-texture environments because there are only few salient features. The resulting sparse or semi-dense map also conveys little information for motion planning. Though some work utilize plane or scene layout for dense map regularization, they require decent state estimation from other sources. In this paper, we propose real-time monocular plane SLAM to demonstrate that scene understanding could improve both state estimation and dense mapping especially in low-texture environments. The plane measurements come from a pop-up 3D plane model applied to each single image. We also combine planes with point based SLAM to improve robustness. On a public TUM dataset, our algorithm generates a dense semantic 3D model with pixel depth error of 6.2 cm while existing SLAM algorithms fail. On a 60 m long dataset with loops, our method creates a much better 3D model with state estimation error of 0.67%.Comment: International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 201