SCE-SLAM: a real-time semantic RGBD SLAM system in dynamic scenes based on spatial coordinate error

Abstract

Abstract Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is one of the prerequisite technologies for intelligent mobile robots to accomplish various tasks in unknown environments. In recent years, many excellent SLAM systems have emerged, but most of them have a basic assumption that the environment is static, which results in their poor performance in dynamic environments. To solve this problem, this paper presents SCE-SLAM: a novel real-time semantic RGB-D SLAM system that is built on the RGB-D mode of ORB-SLAM3. SCE-SLAM tightly combines semantic and geometric information. Considering the real-time requirements, the semantic module provides semantic prior knowledge for the geometric module using the latest and fastest object detection network YOLOv7. Then, a new geometric constraint method is proposed to filter dynamic feature points. This method takes full advantage of depth images and semantic information to recover three-dimensional (3D) feature points and the initial camera pose. A 3D coordinate error is used as a threshold, and SCE-SLAM removes dynamic points using the K-means clustering algorithm. In this way, SCE-SLAM effectively reduces the impact of dynamic points. Furthermore, we validate SCE-SLAM with challenging dynamic sequences of the TUM dataset. The results demonstrate that SCE-SLAM significantly improves the localization accuracy and system robustness in all kinds of dynamic environments.