Visual localization and mapping is a crucial capability to address many
challenges in mobile robotics. It constitutes a robust, accurate and
cost-effective approach for local and global pose estimation within prior maps.
Yet, in highly dynamic environments, like crowded city streets, problems arise
as major parts of the image can be covered by dynamic objects. Consequently,
visual odometry pipelines often diverge and the localization systems
malfunction as detected features are not consistent with the precomputed 3D
model. In this work, we present an approach to automatically detect dynamic
object instances to improve the robustness of vision-based localization and
mapping in crowded environments. By training a convolutional neural network
model with a combination of synthetic and real-world data, dynamic object
instance masks are learned in a semi-supervised way. The real-world data can be
collected with a standard camera and requires minimal further post-processing.
Our experiments show that a wide range of dynamic objects can be reliably
detected using the presented method. Promising performance is demonstrated on
our own and also publicly available datasets, which also shows the
generalization capabilities of this approach.Comment: 4 pages, submitted to the IROS 2018 Workshop "From Freezing to
Jostling Robots: Current Challenges and New Paradigms for Safe Robot
Navigation in Dense Crowds
