Incorporating Semantic Structure in SLAM

May 2021

Incorporating Semantic Structure in SLAM

Authors:

Akash Sharma

Abstract:

For robots to understand the environment they interact with, a combination of geometric information and semantic information is crucial. In this thesis, we propose a fast and scalable Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system that represents indoor scenes as a graph of semantic objects. Leveraging the observation that artificial environments are structured and occupied by recognizable objects, we show that a combination of compositional rendering and sparse volumetric object graph as the map results in a SLAM system suitable for drift-free large-scale indoor reconstruction. While object-based SLAM has been proposed in the past, we improve on both object reconstruction quality, trajectory accuracy, and online performance. We also propose a semantically assisted data association method that results in unambiguous and persistent object landmarks. We deliver an online implementation that can run at about 4-5Hz on a single commodity graphics card, and provide a comprehensive evaluation against state-of-the-art baselines.

Notes:

@mastersthesis{Akash Sharma-2021-127395,
author = {Akash Sharma},
title = {Incorporating Semantic Structure in SLAM},
year = {2021},
month = {May},
school = {Carnegie Mellon University},
address = {Pittsburgh, PA},
number = {CMU-RI-TR-21-18},
keywords = {Semantic SLAM, SLAM, Instance Segmentation, Dense reconstruction},
}
Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.