Title: CubemapSLAM: A Piecewise-Pinhole Monocular Fisheye SLAM System,
Abstract: We present a real-time feature-based SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and
Mapping) system for fisheye cameras featured by a large field-of-view (FoV).
Large FoV cameras are beneficial for large-scale outdoor SLAM applications,
because they increase visual overlap between consecutive frames and capture
more pixels belonging to the static parts of the environment. However, current
feature-based SLAM systems such as PTAM and ORB-SLAM limit their camera model
to pinhole only. To compensate for the vacancy, we propose a novel SLAM system
with the cubemap model that utilizes the full FoV without introducing
distortion from the fisheye lens, which greatly benefits the feature matching
pipeline. In the initialization and point triangulation stages, we adopt a
unified vector-based representation to efficiently handle matches across
multiple faces, and based on this representation we propose and analyze a novel
inlier checking metric. In the optimization stage, we design and test a novel
multi-pinhole reprojection error metric that outperforms other metrics by a
large margin. We evaluate our system comprehensively on a public dataset as
well as a self-collected dataset that contains real-world challenging
sequences. The results suggest that our system is more robust and accurate than
other feature-based fisheye SLAM approaches. The CubemapSLAM system has been
released into the public domain.