Efficient two step optimization for large embedded deformation graph based SLAM

Embedded deformation graph is a widely used technique in deformable geometry and graphical problems. Although the technique has been transmitted to stereo (or RGB-D) camera based SLAM applications, it remains challenging to compromise the computational cost as the model grows. In practice, the processing time grows rapidly in accordance with the expansion of maps. In this paper, we propose an approach to decouple the nodes of deformation graph in large scale dense deformable SLAM and keep the estimation time to be constant. We observe that only partial deformable nodes in the graph are connected to visible points. Based on this fact, the sparsity of the original Hessian matrix is utilized to split the parameter estimation into two independent steps. With this new technique, we achieve faster parameter estimation with amortized computation complexity reduced from O(n
²
) to almost O(1). As a result, the computational cost barely increases as the map keeps growing. Based on our strategy, the computational bottleneck in large scale embedded deformation graph based applications will be greatly mitigated. The effectiveness is validated by experiments, featuring large scale deformation scenarios.