A Robust Stereo Feature-aided Semi-direct SLAM System

Abstract

In autonomous driving, many intelligent perception technologies have been put in use. However, visual SLAM still has problems with robustness, which limits its application, although it has been developed for a long time. We propose a feature-aided semi-direct approach to combine the direct and indirect methods in visual SLAM to allow robust localization under various situations, including large-baseline motion, textureless environment, and great illumination changes. In our approach, we first calculate inter-frame pose estimation by feature matching. Then we use the direct alignment and a multi-scale pyramid, which employs the previous coarse estimation as a priori, to obtain a more precise result. To get more accurate photometric parameters, we combine the online photometric calibration method with visual odometry. Furthermore, we replace the Shi–Tomasi corner with the ORB feature, which is more robust to illumination. For extreme brightness change, we employ the dark channel prior to weaken the halation and maintain the consistency of the image. To evaluate our approach, we build a full stereo visual SLAM system. Experiments on the publicly available dataset and our mobile robot dataset indicate that our approach improves the accuracy and robustness of the SLAM system.