NID-SLAM: Robust Monocular SLAM Using Normalised Information Distance

Geoffrey Pascoe, Will Maddern, Michael Tanner, Pedro Pinies, Paul Newman; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 1435-1444

We propose a direct monocular SLAM algorithm based on the Normalised Information Distance (NID) metric. In contrast to current state-of-the-art direct methods based on photometric error minimisation, our information-theoretic NID metric provides robustness to appearance variation due to lighting, weather and structural changes in the scene. We demonstrate successful localisation and mapping across changes in lighting with a synthetic indoor scene, and across changes in weather (direct sun, rain, snow) using real-world data collected from a vehicle-mounted camera. Our approach runs in real-time on a consumer GPU using OpenGL, and provides comparable localisation accuracy to state-of-the-art photometric methods but significantly outperforms both direct and feature-based methods in robustness to appearance changes.