A Robust RGB-D SLAM System With Points and Lines for Low Texture Indoor Environments

High-performance 6D pose estimation and dense 3D mapping with an RGB-D camera has recently attracted substantial research attention since this type of camera can simultaneously capture RGB and depth information. However, there is an unresolved problem in estimating pose and generating highly accurate 3D maps from challenging indoor scenes. This paper presents a real-time simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system based on the RGB-D camera for indoor mobile robots. Our contributions are fourfold. First, we propose a complete high-accuracy SLAM system based on a combination of information from points and lines, which differs from most solutions that rely on only point features. Second, we propose a novel pose solver to handle point and line correspondences, in which a line-based inliers refinement (LBIR) algorithm is proposed to remove outliers. Third, we construct a unified optimization model to concurrently minimize point and line reprojection errors, and extend it to the bundle adjustment (BA) method. Fourth, extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness, accuracy, and real-time performance of the proposed system on public TUM datasets and real world scenes. The empirical results show that the proposed system achieves a comparable or better performance than state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our system can operate in nearly texture-less scenes, while other methods are prone to failure.