QuadricSLAM: Dual Quadrics As SLAM Landmarks

Lachlan Nicholson, Michael Milford, Niko Sunderhauf; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2018, pp. 313-314

Research in Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is increasingly moving towards richer world representations involving objects and high level features that enable a semantic model of the world for robots, potentially leading to a more meaningful set of robot-world interactions. Many of these advances are grounded in state-of-the-art computer vision techniques primarily developed in the context of image-based benchmark datasets, leaving several challenges to be addressed in adapting them for use in robotics. In this paper, we derive a SLAM formulation that uses dual quadrics as 3D landmark representations, exploiting their ability to compactly represent the size, position and orientation of an object, and show how 2D bounding boxes (such as those typically obtained from visual object detection systems) can directly constrain the quadric parameters via a novel geometric error formulation. We develop a sensor model for deep-learned object detectors that addresses the challenge of partial object detections often encountered in robotics applications, and demonstrate how to jointly estimate the camera pose and constrained dual quadric parameters in factor graph based SLAM with a general perspective camera.