Improved Real-Time Monocular SLAM Using Semantic Segmentation on Selective Frames

Monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is emerging in advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving, because a single camera is cheap and easy to install. Conventional monocular SLAM has two major challenges leading inaccurate localization and mapping. First, it is challenging to estimate scales in localization and mapping. Second, conventional monocular SLAM uses inappropriate mapping factors such as dynamic objects and low-parallax ares in mapping. This paper proposes an improved real-time monocular SLAM that resolves the aforementioned challenges by efficiently using deep learning-based semantic segmentation. To achieve the real-time execution of the proposed method, we apply semantic segmentation only to downsampled keyframes in parallel with mapping processes. In addition, the proposed method corrects scales of camera poses and three-dimensional (3D) points, using estimated ground plane from road-labeled 3D points and the real camera height. The proposed method also removes inappropriate corner features labeled as moving objects and low parallax areas. Experiments with six video sequences demonstrate that the proposed monocular SLAM system achieves significantly more accurate trajectory tracking accuracy compared to state-of-the-art monocular SLAM and comparable trajectory tracking accuracy compared to state-of-the-art stereo SLAM.