RGB-D SLAM using vanishing point and door plate information in corridor environment

This paper proposes a novel approach to an RGB-D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system that uses the vanishing point and door plates in a corridor environment simultaneously for navigation. To increase the stability of the SLAM process in such an environment, the vanishing point and door plates are utilized as landmarks for extended Kalman filter-based SLAM (i.e., EKF SLAM). The vanishing point is a semi-global unique feature usually observed in the corridor frontage, and a door plate has strong signature information (i.e., the room number) for the data association process. Thus, using these types of reliable features as landmarks maintains the stability of the SLAM process. A dense 3D map is represented by an octree structure that includes room number information, which can be useful semantic information. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme yields a better performance than previous SLAM systems.