The assumption of scene rigidity is typical in SLAM algorithms. Such a strong assumption limits the use of most visual SLAM systems in populated real-world environments, which are the target of several relevant applications like service robotics or autonomous vehicles. In this letter we present DynaSLAM, a visual SLAM system that, building on ORB-SLAM2, adds the capabilities of dynamic object detection and background inpainting. DynaSLAM is robust in dynamic scenarios for monocular, stereo, and RGB-D configurations. We are capable of detecting the moving objects either by multiview geometry, deep learning, or both. Having a static map of the scene allows inpainting the frame background that has been occluded by such dynamic objects. We evaluate our system in public monocular, stereo, and RGB-D datasets. We study the impact of several accuracy speed trade-offs to assess the limits of the proposed methodology. DynaSLAM outperforms the accuracy of standard visual SLAM baselines in highly dynamic scenarios. And it also estimates a map of the static parts of the scene, which is a must for long-term applications in real-world environments.
In this paper, we introduce the concept of dense scene flow for visual SLAM applications. Traditional visual SLAM methods assume static features in the environment and that a dominant part of the scene changes only due to camera egomotion. These assumptions make traditional visual SLAM methods prone to failure in crowded real-world dynamic environments with many independently moving objects, such as the typical environments for the visually impaired. By means of a dense scene flow representation, moving objects can be detected. In this way, the visual SLAM process can be improved considerably, by not adding erroneous measurements into the estimation, yielding more consistent and improved localization and mapping results. We show large-scale visual SLAM results in challenging indoor and outdoor crowded environments with real visually impaired users. In particular, we performed experiments inside the Atocha railway station and in the city-center of Alcala de Henares, both in Madrid, Spain. Our results show that the combination of visual SLAM and dense scene flow allows to obtain an accurate localization, improving considerably the results of traditional visual SLAM methods and GPS-based approaches.  A sparse feature-based motion segmentation algorithm for RGB-D data is proposed which offers us a unified way to handle outliers and dynamic scenarios. Together with the pose-graph SLAM framework, they constitute an effective and robust solution that enable us to do RGB-D SLAM in wide range of situations, although traditionally they have been divided into different categories and treated separately using different kinds of methods. Through comparisons with RANSAC using simulated data and testing with different benchmark RGB-D datasets against the state-of-the-art method in RGB-D SLAM, we show that our solution is efficient and effective in handling general static and dynamic scenarios, some of which have not be achieved before. Abstract Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) based on RGB-D data has developed as a fundamental approach for robot perception over the past decades. There is an extensive literature regarding RGB-D SLAM and its applications. However, most of existing RGB-D SLAM methods assume that the traversed environments are static during the SLAM process. This is because moving objects in dynamic environments can severely degrade the SLAM performance. The static world assumption limits the applications of RGB-D SLAM in dynamic environments. In order to address this problem, we proposed a novel RGB-D data-based motion removal approach and integrated it into the front end of RGB-D SLAM. The motion removal approach acted as a pre-processing stage to filter out data that were associated with moving objects. We conducted experiments using a public RGB-D dataset. The results demonstrated that the proposed motion removal approach was able to effectively improve RGB-D SLAM in various challenging dynamic environments.