Fast visual odometry and mapping from RGB-D data

An RGB-D camera is a sensor which outputs color and depth and information about the scene it observes. In this paper, we present a real-time visual odometry and mapping system for RGB-D cameras. The system runs at frequencies of 30Hz and higher in a single thread on a desktop CPU with no GPU acceleration required. We recover the unconstrained 6-DoF trajectory of a moving camera by aligning sparse features observed in the current RGB-D image against a model of previous features. The model is persistent and dynamically updated from new observations using a Kalman Filter. We formulate a novel uncertainty measure for sparse RGD-B features based on a Gaussian mixture model for the filtering stage. Our registration algorithm is capable of closing small-scale loops in indoor environments online without any additional SLAM back-end techniques.