An evaluation of the RGB-D SLAM system

• Published in: 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation pp. 1691 - 1696
• Main Authors: Endres, F., Hess, J., Engelhard, N., Sturm, J., Cremers, D., Burgard, W.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2012
• Subjects: Accuracy; Cameras; Feature extraction; Optimization; Runtime; Simultaneous localization and mapping; Trajectory
• ISBN: 9781467314039; 146731403X
• ISSN: 1050-4729
• DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2012.6225199

We present an approach to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for RGB-D cameras like the Microsoft Kinect. Our system concurrently estimates the trajectory of a hand-held Kinect and generates a dense 3D model of the environment. We present the key features of our approach and evaluate its performance thoroughly on a recently published dataset, including a large set of sequences of different scenes with varying camera speeds and illumination conditions. In particular, we evaluate the accuracy, robustness, and processing time for three different feature descriptors (SIFT, SURF, and ORB). The experiments demonstrate that our system can robustly deal with difficult data in common indoor scenarios while being fast enough for online operation. Our system is fully available as open-source.