In this paper, we propose an novel implementation of a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system based on a monocular camera from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using Depth prediction performed with Capsule Networks (CapsNet), which possess improvements over the drawbacks of the more widely-used Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). An Extended Kalman Filter will assist in estimating the position of the UAV so that we are able to update the belief for the environment. Results will be evaluated on a benchmark dataset to portray the accuracy of our intended approach.
@cite_3: Given the recent advances in depth prediction from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), this paper investigates how predicted depth maps from a deep neural network can be deployed for accurate and dense monocular reconstruction. We propose a method where CNN-predicted dense depth maps are naturally fused together with depth measurements obtained from direct monocular SLAM. Our fusion scheme privileges depth prediction in image locations where monocular SLAM approaches tend to fail, e.g. along low-textured regions, and vice-versa. We demonstrate the use of depth prediction for estimating the absolute scale of the reconstruction, hence overcoming one of the major limitations of monocular SLAM. Finally, we propose a framework to efficiently fuse semantic labels, obtained from a single frame, with dense SLAM, yielding semantically coherent scene reconstruction from a single view. Evaluation results on two benchmark datasets show the robustness and accuracy of our approach.
Additionally, CNN based SLAM @cite_3 can be used for identifying the depth predictions and feeding information to the keyframe initializer and for semantic label fusion, but efficiently most of the work is done using the depth or stereo camera. In particular, the predicted depth map is used as input for Kellar's Point-Based Fusion (RGB-D SLAM) algorithm, but it lacks sharp details mostly due to blurring artifacts.