The ability for an agent to localize itself within an environment is crucial for many real-world applications. For unknown environments, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) enables incremental and concurrent building of and localizing within a map. We present a new, differentiable architecture, Neural Graph Optimizer, progressing towards a complete neural network solution for SLAM by designing a system composed of a local pose estimation model, a novel pose selection module, and a novel graph optimization process. The entire architecture is trained in an end-to-end fashion, enabling the network to automatically learn domain-specific features relevant to the visual odometry and avoid the involved process of feature engineering. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on a simulated 2D maze and the 3D ViZ-Doom environment.
Graph-based SLAM can be categorized either as feature-based or direct methods depending on the type of front-end. Feature-based methods rely on local features (e.g. SIFT, SURF, FAST, ORB, etc.) for pose estimation. For example, ORB-SLAM @cite_3 performs data association and camera relocalization with ORB features and DBoW2 @cite_2 . RANSAC @cite_35 is commonly used for geometric verification and outlier rejection, and there are also prioritized feature matching approaches @cite_0 . However, hand-engineered feature detector and descriptors are not robust to motion blur, illumination changes, or strong viewpoint changes, any of which can cause localization to fail.
@cite_0 @cite_35 @cite_3 @cite_2
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This paper presents a graph-based visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system using straight lines as features. Compared with point features, lines provide far richer information about the structure of the environment and make it possible to infer spatial semantics from the map. Using a stereo rig as the sole sensor, our proposed system utilizes many advanced techniques, such as motion estimation, pose optimization, and bundle adjustment. We use two different representations to parameterize 3-D lines in this paper: Plucker line coordinates for efficient initialization of newly observed line features and projection of 3-D lines, and orthonormal representation for graph optimization. The proposed system is tested with indoor and outdoor sequences, and it exhibits better reconstruction performance against a point-based SLAM system in line-rich environments. Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) methods typically rely on handcrafted visual features or raw RGB values for establishing correspondences between images. These features, while suitable for sparse mapping, often lead to ambiguous matches at texture-less regions when performing dense reconstruction due to the aperture problem. In this work, we explore the use of learned features for the matching task in dense monocular reconstruction. We propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture along with a deeply supervised feature learning scheme for pixel-wise regression of visual descriptors from an image which are best suited for dense monocular SLAM. In particular, our learning scheme minimizes a multi-view matching cost-volume loss with respect to the regressed features at multiple stages within the network, for explicitly learning contextual features that are suitable for dense matching between images captured by a moving monocular camera along the epipolar line. We utilize the learned features from our model for depth estimation inside a real-time dense monocular SLAM framework, where photometric error is replaced by our learned descriptor error. Our evaluation on several challenging indoor scenes demonstrate greatly improved accuracy in dense reconstructions of the well celebrated dense SLAM systems like DTAM, without compromising their real-time performance. In this paper, we develop a robust efficient visual SLAM system that utilizes heterogeneous point and line features. By leveraging ORB-SLAM [1], the proposed system consists of stereo matching, frame tracking, local mapping, loop detection, and bundle adjustment of both point and line features. In particular, as the main theoretical contributions of this paper, we, for the first time, employ the orthonormal representation as the minimal parameterization to model line features along with point features in visual SLAM and analytically derive the Jacobians of the re-projection errors with respect to the line parameters, which significantly improves the SLAM solution. The proposed SLAM has been extensively tested in both synthetic and real-world experiments whose results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in various scenarios. The paper presents a method aiming at improving the reliability of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) approaches based on vision systems. Classical SLAM approaches treat camera capturing time as negligible, and the recorded frames as sharp and well-defined, but this hypothesis does not hold true when the camera is moving too fast. In such cases, in fact, frames may be severely degraded by motion blur, making features matching task a difficult operation. The method here presented is based on a novel approach that combines the benefits of a fully probabilistic SLAM algorithm with the basic ideas behind modern motion blur handling algorithms. Whereby the Kalman Filter, the new approach predicts the best possible blur Point Spread Function (PSF) for each feature and performs matching using also this information.