TT-SLAM: Dense Monocular SLAM for Planar Environments

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel visual SLAM method with dense planar reconstruction using a monocular camera: TT-SLAM. The method exploits planar template-based trackers (TT) to compute camera poses and reconstructs a multi-planar scene representation. Multiple homographies are estimated simultaneously by clustering a set of template trackers supported by superpixelized regions. Compared to RANSAC-based multiple homographies method [1], data association and keyframe selection issues are handled by the continuous nature of template trackers. A non-linear optimization process is applied to all the homographies to improve the precision in pose estimation. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms RANSAC-based multiple homographies method [1] as well as other dense method SLAM techniques such as LSD-SLAM or DPPTAM, and competes with keypoint-based techniques like ORB-SLAM while providing dense planar reconstructions of the environment.