Normalized graph cuts for visual SLAM

Abstract

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) suffers from a quadratic space and time complexity per update step. Recent advancements have been made in approximating the posterior by forcing the information matrix to remain sparse as well as exact techniques for generating the posterior in the full SLAM solution to both the trajectory and the map. Current approximate techniques for maintaining an online estimate of the map for a robot to use while exploring make capacity-based decisions about when to split into sub-maps. This paper will describe an alternative partitioning strategy for online approximate real-time SLAM which makes use of normalized graph cuts to remove less information from the full map.