Structure SLAM with points, planes and objects

Abstract

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental problem for indoor mobile robots operating in unknown environments. While visual SLAM systems often use geometry features, the reconstructed maps lack semantic information. On the other hand, current object detection methods provide rich information about the scene from the image. In this paper, we present a structure SLAM system with feature points, geometry planes, and semantic objects. Unlike other systems modeling planes and objects as collections of points, we choose a parametric representation for these landmarks. For every single frame, we start by generating cuboid candidates of detected objects with varying dimensions and orientations, then use 2D-3D fitting constraints to calculate the cuboid's translation, and finally introduce 3D spatial and 2D image constraints to select the best cuboid candidate. For SLAM optimization, the detected planes and objects can provide geometry constraints to improve the localization result, and act as landmarks to reconstruct a semantic map. Experiments on the ICL NUIM RGB-D dataset show that the proposed point-plane-object SLAM system can slightly improve localization accuracy, and is able to build a semantic map of the environment.