A JOINT EFFORT OF SPEEDED-UP ROBUST FEATURES ALGORITHM AND A DISPARITY-BASED MODEL FOR 3D INDOOR MAPPING USING RGB-D DATA

Abstract

In this paper, we present a method for 3D mapping of indoor environments using RGB-D data. The contribution of our proposed method is two-fold. First, our method exploits a joint effort of the speed-up robust features (SURF) algorithm and a disparity-to-plane model for a coarse-to-fine registration procedure. Once the coarse-to-fine registration task accumulates errors, the same features can appear in two different locations of the map. This is known as the loop closure problem. Then, the variance-covariance matrix that describes the uncertainty of transformation parameters (3D rotation and 3D translation) for view-based loop closure detection followed by a graph-based optimization are proposed to achieve a 3D consistent indoor map. To demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experimental datasets obtained in three indoor environments with different levels of details are used. The experimental results shown that the proposed framework can create 3D indoor maps with an error of 11,97 cm into object space that corresponds to a positional imprecision around 1,5% at the distance of 9 m travelled by sensor.