Metric online monocular SLAM by using a known reference
A metric direct (feature less) online monocular SLAM algorithm is proposed, which, different from the traditional monocular SLAM algorithm, can obtain the absolute scale of the world. A calibrate object is used to calculate the relative pose of the first key frame and initialize the depth map, introducing the metric scale into the reconstruction meanwhile. Highly accurate pose estimation is achieved by direct image alignment, and the depth of image points is obtained by filtering over a large number of pixel wise small baseline stereo comparisons. With those, the environment is reconstructed in real time as pose graph of key frames with associated semi dense depth maps. Also an explicitly scale drift aware formulation is proposed to align the scale between key frames. The algorithm is tested online, and is proved to run in real time on a CPU.
2016 12th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (WCICA)