Real-time 3D visual SLAM with a hand-held camera

Abstract

The practical applications of 3D model acquisition are manifold. In this paper, we present our RGB-D SLAM system, i.e., an approach to generate colored 3D models of objects and indoor scenes using the hand-held Microsoft Kinect sensor. Our approach consists of four processing steps as illustrated in Figure 1. First, we extract SURF features from the incoming color images. Then we match these features against features from the previous images. By evaluating the depth images at the locations of these feature points, we obtain a set of point-wise 3D correspondences between any two frames. Based on these correspondences, we estimate the relative transformation between the frames using RANSAC. The third step is to improve this initial estimate using a variant of the ICP algorithm [1]. As the pair-wise pose estimates between frames are not necessarily