SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is a technology used in robotics and computer vision to enable a device, such as a robot or a vehicle, to map its environment in real-time while simultaneously determining its own position within that environment. The primary goal of SLAM is to allow an autonomous system to navigate and operate in unknown or dynamic surroundings.

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Pseudo RGB-D for Self-Improving Monocular SLAM and Depth Prediction

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Classical monocular Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) and the recently emerging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for monocular depth prediction represent two largely disjoint approaches towards building a 3D map of the surrounding environment. In this paper, we demonstrate that the coupling of these two by leveraging the strengths of each mitigates the other’s shortcomings. Specifically, we propose a joint narrow and wide baseline based self-improving framework, where on the one hand the CNN-predicted depth is leveraged to perform $ extit(Unknown sysvar: (pseudo))$ RGB-D feature-based SLAM, leading to better accuracy and robustness than the monocular RGB SLAM baseline. On the other hand, the bundle-adjusted 3D scene structures and camera poses from the more principled geometric SLAM are injected back into the depth network through novel wide baseline losses proposed for improving the depth prediction network, which then continues to contribute towards better pose and 3D structure estimation in the next iteration. We emphasize that our framework only requires $ extit(Unknown sysvar: ( unlabeled monocular))$ videos in both training and inference stages, and yet is able to outperform state-of-the-art self-supervised $ extit(Unknown sysvar: (monocular))$ and $ extit(Unknown sysvar: (stereo))$ depth prediction networks (e.g, Monodepth2) and feature based monocular SLAM system (i.e, ORB-SLAM). Extensive experiments on KITTI and TUM RGB-D datasets verify the superiority of our self-improving geometry-CNN framework.

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Degeneracy in Self-Calibration Revisited and a Deep Learning Solution for Uncalibrated SLAM

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Self-calibration of camera intrinsics and radial distortion has a long history of research in the computer vision community. However, it remains rare to see real applications of such techniques to modern Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) systems, especially in driving scenarios. In this paper, we revisit the geometric approach to this problem, and provide a theoretical proof that explicitly shows the ambiguity between radial distortion and scene depth when two-view geometry is used to self-calibrate the radial distortion. In view of such geometric degeneracy, we propose a learning approach that trains a convolutional neural network (CNN) on a large amount of synthetic data. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed method by applying it as a checkerboard-free calibration tool for SLAM, achieving comparable or superior performance to previous learning and hand-crafted method

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