A Monocular Biological Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Method Based on a Bionic Vision Model

Animals can navigate robustly through large unknown environments, utilizing inaccurate sensor and egomotion cues. Inspired by the mechanism of the human visual system, this paper presents a biological simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system based on a monocular vision sensor to perform navigation tasks in complex environments. Specifically, our contributions are two folds: an improved monocular visual odometry with a scale recovery algorithm to calibrate the estimated robot pose, and a bionic vision model based on image enhancement algorithm and feature extraction approach to detect closed-loop. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method performs competitively in illumination-varying scenarios indoors and outdoors, which achieve a trade-off to maintain performances in terms of accuracy, execution time, and robustness.