ReSLAM: Reusable SLAM with heterogeneous cameras

Abstract

State-of-the-art SLAM methods are designed to work only with the type of camera employed to create the map, and little attention has been paid to the reusability of the maps created. In other words, the maps generated by current methods can only be reused with the same camera employed to create them. This paper presents a novel SLAM approach that allows maps generated with one camera to be used by other cameras with different resolutions and optics. Our system allows, for instance, creating highly detailed maps processed off-line with high-end computers, to be reused later by low-powered devices (e.g. a drone or robot) using a different camera. The first map, called base map, can be reused with other cameras and dynamically adapted by creating an augmented map. The principal idea of our method is a bottom-up pyramidal representation of the images that allows us to match keypoints between different camera types seamlessly. The experiments conducted validate our proposal, showing that it outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, namely ORBSLAM, OpenVSLAM and UcoSLAM.