Experimental verification of direct depth computing technique for monocular visual SLAM systems

Abstract

This paper verifies a recently published method of monocular depth computing in the context of visual SLAM. The closed form depth solution was exploited in the measurement model of a monocular EKF visual SLAM algorithm. SIFT interest points are tracked during camera motion and a suitable feature initialization is presented. The visual SLAM system is verified through experiments on a mobile robot platform and the results are benchmarked to groundtruth.