scholarly journals Visual SLAM Framework Based on Segmentation with the Improvement of Loop Closure Detection in Dynamic Environments

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 1385-1397
Author(s):  
Leyuan Sun ◽  
Rohan P. Singh ◽  
Fumio Kanehiro ◽  
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...  

Most simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems assume that SLAM is conducted in a static environment. When SLAM is used in dynamic environments, the accuracy of each part of the SLAM system is adversely affected. We term this problem as dynamic SLAM. In this study, we propose solutions for three main problems in dynamic SLAM: camera tracking, three-dimensional map reconstruction, and loop closure detection. We propose to employ geometry-based method, deep learning-based method, and the combination of them for object segmentation. Using the information from segmentation to generate the mask, we filter the keypoints that lead to errors in visual odometry and features extracted by the CNN from dynamic areas to improve the performance of loop closure detection. Then, we validate our proposed loop closure detection method using the precision-recall curve and also confirm the framework’s performance using multiple datasets. The absolute trajectory error and relative pose error are used as metrics to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed SLAM framework in comparison with state-of-the-art methods. The findings of this study can potentially improve the robustness of SLAM technology in situations where mobile robots work together with humans, while the object-based point cloud byproduct has potential for other robotics tasks.

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 2299
Author(s):  
Qin Ye ◽  
Pengcheng Shi ◽  
Kunyuan Xu ◽  
Popo Gui ◽  
Shaoming Zhang

Reducing the cumulative error is a crucial task in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Usually, Loop Closure Detection (LCD) is exploited to accomplish this work for SLAM and robot navigation. With a fast and accurate loop detection, it can significantly improve global localization stability and reduce mapping errors. However, the LCD task based on point cloud still has some problems, such as over-reliance on high-resolution sensors, and poor detection efficiency and accuracy. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel and fast global LCD method using a low-cost 16 beam Lidar based on “Simplified Structure”. Firstly, we extract the “Simplified Structure” from the indoor point cloud, classify them into two levels, and manage the “Simplified Structure” hierarchically according to its structure salience. The “Simplified Structure” has simple feature geometry and can be exploited to capture the indoor stable structures. Secondly, we analyze the point cloud registration suitability with a pre-match, and present a hierarchical matching strategy with multiple geometric constraints in Euclidean Space to match two scans. Finally, we construct a multi-state loop evaluation model for a multi-level structure to determine whether the two candidate scans are a loop. In fact, our method also provides a transformation for point cloud registration with “Simplified Structure” when a loop is detected successfully. Experiments are carried out on three types of indoor environment. A 16 beam Lidar is used to collect data. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can detect global loop closures efficiently and accurately. The average global LCD precision, accuracy and negative are approximately 0.90, 0.96, and 0.97, respectively.


Author(s):  
Tanaka Kanji ◽  

Loop closure detection, which is the task of identifying locations revisited by a robot in a sequence of odometry and perceptual observations, is typically formulated as a combination of two subtasks: (1) bag-of-words image retrieval and (2) post-verification using random sample consensus (RANSAC) geometric verification. The main contribution of this study is the proposal of a novel post-verification framework that achieves good precision recall trade-off in loop closure detection. This study is motivated by the fact that not all loop closure hypotheses are equally plausible (e.g., owing to mutual consistency between loop closure constraints) and that if we have evidence that one hypothesis is more plausible than the others, then it should be verified more frequently. We demonstrate that the loop closure detection problem can be viewed as an instance of a multi-model hypothesize-and-verify framework. Thus, we can build guided sampling strategies on this framework where loop closures proposed using image retrieval are verified in a planned order (rather than in a conventional uniform order) to operate in a constant time. Experimental results using a stereo simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system confirm that the proposed strategy, the use of loop closure constraints and robot trajectory hypotheses as a guide, achieves promising results despite the fact that there exists a significant number of false positive constraints and hypotheses.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (12) ◽  
pp. e0261053
Author(s):  
Gang Wang ◽  
Saihang Gao ◽  
Han Ding ◽  
Hao Zhang ◽  
Hongmin Cai

Accurate and reliable state estimation and mapping are the foundation of most autonomous driving systems. In recent years, researchers have focused on pose estimation through geometric feature matching. However, most of the works in the literature assume a static scenario. Moreover, a registration based on a geometric feature is vulnerable to the interference of a dynamic object, resulting in a decline of accuracy. With the development of a deep semantic segmentation network, we can conveniently obtain the semantic information from the point cloud in addition to geometric information. Semantic features can be used as an accessory to geometric features that can improve the performance of odometry and loop closure detection. In a more realistic environment, semantic information can filter out dynamic objects in the data, such as pedestrians and vehicles, which lead to information redundancy in generated map and map-based localization failure. In this paper, we propose a method called LiDAR inertial odometry (LIO) with loop closure combined with semantic information (LIO-CSI), which integrates semantic information to facilitate the front-end process as well as loop closure detection. First, we made a local optimization on the semantic labels provided by the Sparse Point-Voxel Neural Architecture Search (SPVNAS) network. The optimized semantic information is combined into the front-end process of tightly-coupled light detection and ranging (LiDAR) inertial odometry via smoothing and mapping (LIO-SAM), which allows us to filter dynamic objects and improve the accuracy of the point cloud registration. Then, we proposed a semantic assisted scan-context method to improve the accuracy and robustness of loop closure detection. The experiments were conducted on an extensively used dataset KITTI and a self-collected dataset on the Jilin University (JLU) campus. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is better than the purely geometric method, especially in dynamic scenarios, and it has a good generalization ability.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (17) ◽  
pp. 3520
Author(s):  
Zhian Yuan ◽  
Ke Xu ◽  
Xiaoyu Zhou ◽  
Bin Deng ◽  
Yanxin Ma

Loop closure detection is an important component of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). However, most existing loop closure detection methods are vulnerable to complex environments and use limited information from images. As higher-level image information and multi-information fusion can improve the robustness of place recognition, a semantic–visual–geometric information-based loop closure detection algorithm (SVG-Loop) is proposed in this paper. In detail, to reduce the interference of dynamic features, a semantic bag-of-words model was firstly constructed by connecting visual features with semantic labels. Secondly, in order to improve detection robustness in different scenes, a semantic landmark vector model was designed by encoding the geometric relationship of the semantic graph. Finally, semantic, visual, and geometric information was integrated by fuse calculation of the two modules. Compared with art-of-the-state methods, experiments on the TUM RBG-D dataset, KITTI odometry dataset, and practical environment show that SVG-Loop has advantages in complex environments with varying light, changeable weather, and dynamic interference.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (7) ◽  
pp. 1906
Author(s):  
Dongxiao Han ◽  
Yuwen Li ◽  
Tao Song ◽  
Zhenyang Liu

Aiming at addressing the issues related to the tuning of loop closure detection parameters for indoor 2D graph-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), this article proposes a multi-objective optimization method for these parameters. The proposed method unifies the Karto SLAM algorithm, an efficient evaluation approach for map quality with three quantitative metrics, and a multi-objective optimization algorithm. More particularly, the evaluation metrics, i.e., the proportion of occupied grids, the number of corners and the amount of enclosed areas, can reflect the errors such as overlaps, blurring and misalignment when mapping nested loops, even in the absence of ground truth. The proposed method has been implemented and validated by testing on four datasets and two real-world environments. For all these tests, the map quality can be improved using the proposed method. Only loop closure detection parameters have been considered in this article, but the proposed evaluation metrics and optimization method have potential applications in the automatic tuning of other SLAM parameters to improve the map quality.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 1467
Author(s):  
Chao Sheng ◽  
Shuguo Pan ◽  
Wang Gao ◽  
Yong Tan ◽  
Tao Zhao

Traditional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) (with loop closure detection), or Visual Odometry (VO) (without loop closure detection), are based on the static environment assumption. When working in dynamic environments, they perform poorly whether using direct methods or indirect methods (feature points methods). In this paper, Dynamic-DSO which is a semantic monocular direct visual odometry based on DSO (Direct Sparse Odometry) is proposed. The proposed system is completely implemented with the direct method, which is different from the most current dynamic systems combining the indirect method with deep learning. Firstly, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are applied to the original RGB image to generate the pixel-wise semantic information of dynamic objects. Then, based on the semantic information of the dynamic objects, dynamic candidate points are filtered out in keyframes candidate points extraction; only static candidate points are reserved in the tracking and optimization module, to achieve accurate camera pose estimation in dynamic environments. The photometric error calculated by the projection points in dynamic region of subsequent frames are removed from the whole photometric error in pyramid motion tracking model. Finally, the sliding window optimization which neglects the photometric error calculated in the dynamic region of each keyframe is applied to obtain the precise camera pose. Experiments on the public TUM dynamic dataset and the modified Euroc dataset show that the positioning accuracy and robustness of the proposed Dynamic-DSO is significantly higher than the state-of-the-art direct method in dynamic environments, and the semi-dense cloud map constructed by Dynamic-DSO is clearer and more detailed.


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