Abstract
Building a spatially consistent model is a key functionality to endow a mobile robot with autonomy. Without an initial map or an absolute localization means, it requires to concurrently solve the localization and mapping problems. For this purpose, vision is a powerful sensor, because it provides data from which stable features can be extracted and matched as the robot moves. But it does not directly provide 3D information, which is a difficulty for estimating the geometry of the environment. This article presents two approaches to the SLAM problem using vision: one with stereovision, and one with monocular images. Both approaches rely on a robust interest point matching algorithm that works in very diverse environments. The stereovision based approach is a classic SLAM implementation, whereas the monocular approach introduces a new way to initialize landmarks. Both approaches are analyzed and compared with extensive experimental results, with a rover and a blimp.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arun, K.S., Huang, T.S., and Blostein, S.D. 1987. Least-squares fitting of two 3d-points sets. IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 9(5):698–700.
Bailey, T. 2003. Constrained initialisation for bearing-only slam. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Taipei, Taiwan.
Borges, G.A. and Aldon, M-J. 2002. Optimal mobile robot pose estimation using geometrical maps. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 18(1):87–94.
Brown, L.G. 1992. A survey of image registration techniques. ACM Computing Surveys, 24(4):325–376.
Castellanos, J.A., Neira, J., and Tardos, J.D. 2004. Limits to the consistency of EKF-based SLAM. In 5th symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles, Lisbon, Portugal.
Chatila, R. and Laumond, J.-P. 1985. Position referencing and consistent world modeling for mobile robots. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, St Louis (USA), pp. 138–145.
Davison, A.J. 2003. Real-time simultaneous localisation and mapping with a single camera. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Vision, Nice.
Davison, A.J., Cid, Y.G., and Kita, N. 2004. Real-time 3d slam with wide-angle vision. In Proceedings of the IFAC Symposium on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles, Lisbon.
Deans, M. and Hebert, M. 2000. Experimental comparison of techniques for localization and mapping using a bearings only sensor. In Proceedings of the ISER ’00 7th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics.
Dellaert, F., Fox, D., Burgard, W., and Thrun, S. 1999. Monte carlo localization for mobile robots. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA99).
Dissanayake, G., Newman, P.M., Durrant-Whyte, H.-F., Clark, S., and Csorba, M. 2001. A solution to the simultaneous localization and map building (slam) problem. IEEE Transaction on Robotic and Automation, 17(3):229–241.
Dufournaud, Y., Schmid, C., and Horaud, R. 2004. Image matching with scale adjustment. Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 93(2):175–194.
Estrada, C., Neira, J., and Tardos, J.D. 2005. Hierarchical slam: real-time accurate mapping of large environments. IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
Freeman, W.T. and Adelson, E.H. 1991. The design and use of steerable filters. IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 13(9):891–906.
Guivant, J. and Nebot, E. 2001. Optimization of the simultaneous localization and map building algorithm for real time implementation. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 17(3):242– 257.
Haralick, R.M. 1994. Propagating covariances in computer vision. In International Conference on Pattern Recognition, pp. 493–498.
Harris, C. and Stephens, M. 1988. A combined corner and edge detector. In 4th Alvey Vision Conference, Manchester (UK), pp. 147– 151.
Heeger, D.J. and Jepson, A.D. 1992. Subspace methods for recognition rigid motion i: Algorithm and implementation. International Journal of Computer Vision, 7(2):95–117.
Jung, I.-K. and Lacroix, S. 2001. A robust interest point matching algorithm. In 8th International Conference on Computer Vision, Vancouver (Canada).
Jung, I.-K. and Lacroix, S. 2003. Simultaneous localization and mapping with stereovision. In International Symposium on Robotics Research, Siena (Italy).
Kim, J.H. and Sukkarieh, S. 2003. Airborne simultaneous localisation and map building. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Taipei, Taiwan.
Knight, J., Davison, A., and Reid, I. 2001. Towards constant time SLAM using postponement. In Proc. IEEE/RSJ Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Maui, HI. IEEE Computer Society Press, vol. 1, pp. 406–412.
Konolige, K. 2005. Constraint maps: A general least squares method for slam. submited for publication.
Kwok, N.M. and Dissanayake, G. 2004. An efficient multiple hypothesis filter for bearing-only slam. In IROS 2004.
Kwok, N.M., Dissanayake, G., and Ha, Q.P. 2005. Bearing-only slam using a sprt based gaussian sum filter. In ICRA 2005.
Lemaire, T., Lacroix, S., and Solà, J. 2005. A practical 3d bearing only slam algorithm. In IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
Leonard, J.J. and Feder, H.J.S. 2001. Decoupled stochastic mapping. IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, pp. 561–571.
Leonard, J., Rikoski, R., Newman, P., and Bosse, M. 2002. Mapping partially observable features from multiple uncertain vantage points. International Journal of Robotics Research.
Lhuillier, M. and Quan, L. 2003. Match propagation for image-based modeling and rendering. IEEE transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 24(8):1140–1146.
Lowe, D.G. 1999. Object recognition from local scale-invariant features. In 7th International Conference on Computer Vision, Kerkyra, Corfu (Greece), pp. 1150–1157.
Mallet, A., Lacroix, S., and Gallo, L. 2000. Position estimation in outdoor environments using pixel tracking and stereovision. In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, San Francisco, CA (USA), pp. 3519–3524.
Martin, J. and Crowley, J. 1995. Comparison of correlation techniques. In International Conference on Intelligent Autonmous Systems, Karlsruhe (Germany), pp. 86–93.
Matthies, L. 1992. Toward stochastic modeling of obstacle detectability in passive stereo range imagery. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Champaign, Illinois (USA), pp. 765–768.
Nister, D. 2003. Preemptive ransac for live structure and motion estimation. In Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV’03), vol. 1, p. 199.
Olson, C., Matthies, L., Schoppers, M., and Maimone, M. 2000. Robust stereo ego-motion for long distance navigation. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Hilton Head Island, SC (USA). JPL.
Peach, N. 1995. Bearing-only tracking using a set of range-parametrised extended kalman filters. IEEE Proceedings on Control Theory Applications, 142(1):73–80.
Rothganger, F., Lazebnik, S., Schmid, C., and Ponce, J. 2003. 3d object modeling and recognition using local affine-invariant image descriptors and multi-view spatial constraints. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Madison, WI (USA), pp. 272–277.
Schmid, C. and Mohr, R. 1997. Local greyvalue invariants for image retrieval. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 19(5).
Schmid, C., Mohr, R., and Bauckhage, C. 1998. Comparing and evaluating interest points. In International Conference on Computer Vision.
Se, S., Lowe, D., and Little, J. 2002. Mobile robot localization and mapping with uncertainty using scale-invariant visual landmarks. International Journal of Robotics Research, 21(8):735–758.
Shi, J. and Tomasi, C. 1994. Good features to track. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Seattle (USA), pp. 593–600.
Smith, R., Self, M., and Cheeseman, P. 1987. A stochastic map for uncertain spatial relationships. In Robotics Research: The Fourth International Symposium, Santa Cruz (USA), pp. 468– 474.
Solà, J., Devy, M., Monin, A., and Lemaire, T. 2005. Undelayed initialization in bearing only slam. In IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
Thrun, S. 2002. Robotic mapping: A survey. In Exploring Artificial Intelligence in the New Millenium G. Lakemeyer and B. Nebel (eds.), Morgan Kaufmann.
Thrun, S., Koller, D., Ghahramani, Z., Durrant-Whyte, H., and Ng, A.Y. 2002. Simultaneous mapping and localization with sparse extended information filters. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, Nice, France.
Thrun, S., Liu, Y., Koller, D., Ng, A.Y., Ghahramani, Z., and Durrant-Whyte, H. 2004. Simultaneous localization and mapping with sparse extended information filters. International Journal of Robotics Research, Submitted for journal publication.
Vidal, R., Ma, Y., Hsu, S., and Sastry, S. 2001. Optimal motion estimation from multiview normalized epipolar constraint. In 8th International Conference on Computer Vision, Vancouver (Canada), pp. 34–41.
Zabih, R. and Woodfill, J. 1994. Non-parametric local transforms for computing visual correspondence. In Third European Conference on Computer Vision, Stockholm, (Sweden).
Zhang, Z. and Faugeras, O. 1992. Estimation of displacements from two 3-D frames obtained from stereo. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 14(12):1141– 1156.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lemaire, T., Berger, C., Jung, IK. et al. Vision-Based SLAM: Stereo and Monocular Approaches. Int J Comput Vision 74, 343–364 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-007-0042-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-007-0042-3