As one of the core technologies for autonomous mobile robots, Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM) has been widely researched in recent years. However, most state-of-the-art VSLAM adopts a strong scene rigidity assumption for analytical convenience, which limits the utility of these algorithms for real-world environments with independent dynamic objects. Hence, this paper presents a semantic and geometric constraints VSLAM (SGC-VSLAM), which is built on the RGB-D mode of ORB-SLAM2 with the addition of dynamic detection and static point cloud map construction modules. In detail, a novel improved quadtree-based method was adopted for SGC-VSLAM to enhance the performance of the feature extractor in ORB-SLAM (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF-SLAM). Moreover, a new dynamic feature detection method called semantic and geometric constraints was proposed, which provided a robust and fast way to filter dynamic features. The semantic bounding box generated by YOLO v3 (You Only Look Once, v3) was used to calculate a more accurate fundamental matrix between adjacent frames, which was then used to filter all of the truly dynamic features. Finally, a static point cloud was estimated by using a new drawing key frame selection strategy. Experiments on the public TUM RGB-D (Red-Green-Blue Depth) dataset were conducted to evaluate the proposed approach. This evaluation revealed that the proposed SGC-VSLAM can effectively improve the positioning accuracy of the ORB-SLAM2 system in high-dynamic scenarios and was also able to build a map with the static parts of the real environment, which has long-term application value for autonomous mobile robots.
Vision of autonomous mobile robots in indoor environments.
