Real-Time RGB-D Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Guided by Terrestrial LiDAR Point Cloud for Indoor 3-D Reconstruction and Camera Pose Estimation

In recent years, low-cost and lightweight RGB and depth (RGB-D) sensors, such as Microsoft Kinect, have made available rich image and depth data, making them very popular in the field of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), which has been increasingly used in robotics, self-driving vehicles, and augmented reality. The RGB-D SLAM constructs 3D environmental models of natural landscapes while simultaneously estimating camera poses. However, in highly variable illumination and motion blur environments, long-distance tracking can result in large cumulative errors and scale shifts. To address this problem in actual applications, in this study, we propose a novel multithreaded RGB-D SLAM framework that incorporates a highly accurate prior terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point cloud, which can mitigate cumulative errors and improve the system’s robustness in large-scale and challenging scenarios. First, we employed deep learning to achieve system automatic initialization and motion recovery when tracking is lost. Next, we used terrestrial LiDAR point cloud to obtain prior data of the landscape, and then we applied the point-to-surface inductively coupled plasma (ICP) iterative algorithm to realize accurate camera pose control from the previously obtained LiDAR point cloud data, and finally expanded its control range in the local map construction. Furthermore, an innovative double window segment-based map optimization method is proposed to ensure consistency, better real-time performance, and high accuracy of map construction. The proposed method was tested for long-distance tracking and closed-loop in two different large indoor scenarios. The experimental results indicated that the standard deviation of the 3D map construction is 10 cm in a mapping distance of 100 m, compared with the LiDAR ground truth. Further, the relative cumulative error of the camera in closed-loop experiments is 0.09%, which is twice less than that of the typical SLAM algorithm (3.4%). Therefore, the proposed method was demonstrated to be more robust than the ORB-SLAM2 algorithm in complex indoor environments.