We present ORB-SLAM2, a complete simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system for monocular, stereo and RGB-D cameras, including map reuse, loop closing, and relocalization capabilities. The system works in real time on standard central processing units in a wide variety of environments from small hand-held indoors sequences, to drones flying in industrial environments and cars driving around a city. Our back-end, based on bundle adjustment with monocular and stereo observations, allows for accurate trajectory estimation with metric scale. Our system includes a lightweight localization mode that leverages visual odometry tracks for unmapped regions and matches with map points that allow for zero-drift localization. The evaluation on 29 popular public sequences shows that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, being in most cases the most accurate SLAM solution. We publish the source code, not only for the benefit of the SLAM community, but with the aim of being an out-of-the-box SLAM solution for researchers in other fields.
A remarkable early stereo SLAM system was the work of @cite_10 . Based on Conditionally Independent Divide and Conquer EKF-SLAM it was able to operate in larger environments than other approaches at that time. Most importantly, it was the first stereo SLAM exploiting both close and far points (i.e. points whose depth cannot be reliably estimated due to little disparity in the stereo camera), using an inverse depth parametrization @cite_4 for the latter. They empirically showed that points can be reliably triangulated if their depth is less than @math times the stereo baseline. In this work we follow this strategy of treating in a different way and points, as explained in Section .
@cite_10 @cite_4
2101648351 2218842719 169439271 2118428504
In this paper, we describe a system that can carry out simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in large indoor and outdoor environments using a stereo pair moving with 6 DOF as the only sensor. Unlike current visual SLAM systems that use either bearing-only monocular information or 3-D stereo information, our system accommodates both monocular and stereo. Textured point features are extracted from the images and stored as 3-D points if seen in both images with sufficient disparity, or stored as inverse depth points otherwise. This allows the system to map both near and far features: the first provide distance and orientation, and the second provide orientation information. Unlike other vision-only SLAM systems, stereo does not suffer from ldquoscale driftrdquo because of unobservability problems, and thus, no other information such as gyroscopes or accelerometers is required in our system. Our SLAM algorithm generates sequences of conditionally independent local maps that can share information related to the camera motion and common features being tracked. The system computes the full map using the novel conditionally independent divide and conquer algorithm, which allows constant time operation most of the time, with linear time updates to compute the full map. To demonstrate the robustness and scalability of our system, we show experimental results in indoor and outdoor urban environments of 210 m and 140 m loop trajectories, with the stereo camera being carried in hand by a person walking at normal walking speeds of 4--5 km h. We propose a novel Large-Scale Direct SLAM algorithm for stereo cameras (Stereo LSD-SLAM) that runs in real-time at high frame rate on standard CPUs. In contrast to sparse interest-point based methods, our approach aligns images directly based on the photoconsistency of all high-contrast pixels, including corners, edges and high texture areas. It concurrently estimates the depth at these pixels from two types of stereo cues: Static stereo through the fixed-baseline stereo camera setup as well as temporal multi-view stereo exploiting the camera motion. By incorporating both disparity sources, our algorithm can even estimate depth of pixels that are under-constrained when only using fixed-baseline stereo. Using a fixed baseline, on the other hand, avoids scale-drift that typically occurs in pure monocular SLAM.We furthermore propose a robust approach to enforce illumination invariance, capable of handling aggressive brightness changes between frames - greatly improving the performance in realistic settings. In experiments, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results on stereo SLAM benchmarks such as Kitti or challenging datasets from the EuRoC Challenge 3 for micro aerial vehicles. State of the art visual SLAM systems have recently been presented which are capable of accurate, large-scale and real-time performance, but most of these require stereo vision. Important application areas in robotics and beyond open up if similar performance can be demonstrated using monocular vision, since a single camera will always be cheaper, more compact and easier to calibrate than a multi-camera rig. With high quality estimation, a single camera moving through a static scene of course effectively provides its own stereo geometry via frames distributed over time. However, a classic issue with monocular visual SLAM is that due to the purely projective nature of a single camera, motion estimates and map structure can only be recovered up to scale. Without the known inter-camera distance of a stereo rig to serve as an anchor, the scale of locally constructed map portions and the corresponding motion estimates is therefore liable to drift over time. In this paper we describe a new near real-time visual SLAM system which adopts the continuous keyframe optimisation approach of the best current stereo systems, but accounts for the additional challenges presented by monocular input. In particular, we present a new pose-graph optimisation technique which allows for the efficient correction of rotation, translation and scale drift at loop closures. Especially, we describe the Lie group of similarity transformations and its relation to the corresponding Lie algebra. We also present in detail the system’s new image processing front-end which is able accurately to track hundreds of features per frame, and a filter-based approach for feature initialisation within keyframe-based SLAM. Our approach is proven via large-scale simulation and real-world experiments where a camera completes large looped trajectories. We present a new parametrization for point features within monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) that permits efficient and accurate representation of uncertainty during undelayed initialization and beyond, all within the standard extended Kalman filter (EKF). The key concept is direct parametrization of the inverse depth of features relative to the camera locations from which they were first viewed, which produces measurement equations with a high degree of linearity. Importantly, our parametrization can cope with features over a huge range of depths, even those that are so far from the camera that they present little parallax during motion---maintaining sufficient representative uncertainty that these points retain the opportunity to "come in'' smoothly from infinity if the camera makes larger movements. Feature initialization is undelayed in the sense that even distant features are immediately used to improve camera motion estimates, acting initially as bearing references but not permanently labeled as such. The inverse depth parametrization remains well behaved for features at all stages of SLAM processing, but has the drawback in computational terms that each point is represented by a 6-D state vector as opposed to the standard three of a Euclidean XYZ representation. We show that once the depth estimate of a feature is sufficiently accurate, its representation can safely be converted to the Euclidean XYZ form, and propose a linearity index that allows automatic detection and conversion to maintain maximum efficiency---only low parallax features need be maintained in inverse depth form for long periods. We present a real-time implementation at 30 Hz, where the parametrization is validated in a fully automatic 3-D SLAM system featuring a handheld single camera with no additional sensing. Experiments show robust operation in challenging indoor and outdoor environments with a very large ranges of scene depth, varied motion, and also real time 360deg loop closing.