Real-time dense simultaneous localization and mapping using monocular cameras

Cameras are powerful sensors for robotic navigation as they provide high-resolution environment information (color, shape, texture, etc.), while being lightweight, low-power, and inexpensive. Exploiting such sensor data for navigation tasks typically falls into the realm of monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), where both the robot's pose and a map of the environment are estimated concurrently from the imagery produced by a single camera mounted on the robot. This thesis presents a monocular SLAM solution capable of reconstructing dense 3D geometry online without the aid of a graphics processing unit (GPU). The key contribution is a multi-resolution depth estimation and spatial smoothing process that exploits the correlation between low-texture image regions and simple planar structure to adaptively scale the complexity of the generated keyframe depthmaps to the quality of the input imagery. High-texture image regions are represented at higher resolutions to capture fine detail, while low-texture regions are represented at coarser resolutions for smooth surfaces. This approach allows for significant computational savings while simultaneously increasing reconstruction density and quality when compared to the state-of-the-art. Preliminary qualitative results are also presented for an adaptive meshing technique that generates dense reconstructions using only the pixels necessary to represent the scene geometry, which further reduces the computational requirements for fully dense reconstructions.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Greene, W. Nicholas (William Nicholas)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nicholas Roy and Ted J. Steiner.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/107051

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/107051