An Enhanced Visual SLAM Supported by the Integration of Plane Features for the Indoor Environment

This paper presents an enhanced indoor RGB-D simultaneously localisation and mapping (SLAM) system based on the integration of plane and point features. A new method was proposed to register each point feature to a corresponding plane feature and then modify its position accordingly. The plane features are parallelly extracted from depth data sources and used jointly to solve the camera pose with point features. Both point and plane features are stored on the map and used for backend optimisation, where the weights associated with features can be dynamically updated. At the same time, the on-plane feature points are fixed during the optimisation. The proposed method has been tested with open-source benchmarks, including the scenarios with or without a structured environment. Experiment results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm performs better than other widely cited visual SLAM systems in some structured environments, in which the point features form plane features without introducing excessive errors.