Illumination change robustness in direct visual SLAM

Direct visual odometry and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods determine camera poses by means of direct image alignment. This optimizes a photometric cost term based on the Lucas-Kanade method. Many recent works use the brightness constancy assumption in the alignment cost formulation and therefore cannot cope with significant illumination changes. Such changes are especially likely to occur for loop closures in SLAM. Alternatives exist which attempt to match images more robustly. In our paper, we perform a systematic evaluation of real-time capable methods. We determine their accuracy and robustness in the context of odometry and of loop closures, both on real images as well as synthetic datasets with simulated lighting changes. We find that for real images, a Census-based method outperforms the others. We make our new datasets available online.