A Semantic SLAM System for Catadioptric Panoramic Cameras in Dynamic Environments

• Main Authors: Yu Zhang, Xiping Xu, Ning Zhang, Yaowen Lv
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-09-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: SLAM; semantic segmentation; multi-view geometry; dynamic environments
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/17/5889

When a traditional visual SLAM system works in a dynamic environment, it will be disturbed by dynamic objects and perform poorly. In order to overcome the interference of dynamic objects, we propose a semantic SLAM system for catadioptric panoramic cameras in dynamic environments. A real-time instance segmentation network is used to detect potential moving targets in the panoramic image. In order to find the real dynamic targets, potential moving targets are verified according to the sphere’s epipolar constraints. Then, when extracting feature points, the dynamic objects in the panoramic image are masked. Only static feature points are used to estimate the pose of the panoramic camera, so as to improve the accuracy of pose estimation. In order to verify the performance of our system, experiments were conducted on public data sets. The experiments showed that in a highly dynamic environment, the accuracy of our system is significantly better than traditional algorithms. By calculating the RMSE of the absolute trajectory error, we found that our system performed up to 96.3% better than traditional SLAM. Our catadioptric panoramic camera semantic SLAM system has higher accuracy and robustness in complex dynamic environments.