3D planar RGB-D SLAM system

Abstract : Applications such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) can greatly benefit from RGB-D sensor data to produce 3D maps of the environment as well as sensor’s trajectory estimation. However, the resulting 3D points map can be cumbersome, and since indoor environments are mainly composed of planar surfaces, the idea is to use planes as building blocks for a SLAM process. This paper describes an RGB-D SLAM system benefiting from planes segmentation to generate lightweight 3D plane-based maps. Our goal is to produce reduced 3D maps composed solely of planes sections that can be used on platforms with limited memory and computation resources. We present the introduction of planar regions in a regular RGB-D SLAM system and evaluate the benefits regarding both resulting map and estimated camera trajectory.