A Robust Stereo Semi-direct SLAM System Based on Hybrid Pyramid

Abstract

We propose a hybrid pyramid based approach to fuse the direct and indirect methods in visual SLAM, to allow robust localization under various situations including large-baseline motion, low-texture environment, and various illumination changes. In our approach, we first calculate coarse inter-frame pose estimation by matching the feature points. Subsequently, we use both direct image alignment and a multiscale pyramid method, for refining the previous estimation to attain better precision. Furthermore, we perform online photometric calibration along with pose estimation, to reduce un-modelled errors. To evaluate our approach, we conducted various real-world experiments on both public datasets and self-collected ones, by implementing a full SLAM system with the proposed methods. The results show that our system improves both localization accuracy and robustness by a wide margin.