Dense Planar-Inertial SLAM with Structural Constraints

Abstract

In this work, we develop a novel dense planar- inertial SLAM (DPI-SLAM) system to reconstruct dense 3D models of large indoor environments using a hand-held RGB-D sensor and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The preintegrated IMU measurements are loosely-coupled with the dense visual odometry (VO) estimation and tightly-coupled with the planar measurements in a full SLAM framework. The poses, velocities, and IMU biases are optimized together with the planar landmarks in a global factor graph using incremental smoothing and mapping with the Bayes Tree (iSAM2). With odometry estimation using both RGB-D and IMU data, our system can keep track of the poses of the sensors even without sufficient planes or visual information (e.g. textureless walls) temporarily. Modeling planes and IMU states in the fully probabilistic global optimization reduces the drift that distorts the reconstruction results of other SLAM algorithms. Moreover, structural constraints between nearby planes (e.g. right angles) are added into the DPI-SLAM system, which further recovers the drift and distortion. We test our DPI-SLAM on large indoor datasets and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance as the first planar-inertial SLAM system.