Real-Time Map Building with Uncertainty using Colour Camera and Scanning Laser

This paper presents a real-time data fusion technique to produce three dimensional colour point clouds of the environment from a mobile platform. Range from a scanning laser and colour from a video camera are locally fused using deterministic transforms. Platform pose information is used to provide global coordinates. Measurement uncertainty is maintained throughout the transformations to enable the fusion of multiple data sets obtained at different times or from different locations, and to enable applications that use the data to assess its quality. The complete system is implemented on an autonomous outdoor ground vehicle and vast colour models of outdoor terrain are built in real time. Although similar techniques have been described in the literature, they have not been applied to a large scale outdoor environment from a mobile platform. The contribution of this paper is to show that very high quality three dimensional colour point clouds can be built in real-time, with a relatively simple approach.