Robust RGB-D slam using point and line features for low textured scene

Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction using RGB-D camera with simultaneous color image and depth information is attractive as it can significantly reduce the cost of equipment and time for data collection. Point feature is commonly used for aligning two RGB-D frames. Due to lacking reliable point features, RGB-D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is easy to fail in low textured scenes. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes a robust RGB-D SLAM system fusing both points and lines, because lines can provide robust geometry constraints when points are insufficient. To comprehensively fuse line constraints, we combine 2D and 3D line reprojection error with point reprojection error in a novel cost function. To solve the cost function and filter out wrong feature matches, we build a robust pose solver using the Gauss–Newton method and Chi-Square test. To correct the drift of camera poses, we maintain a sliding-window framework to update the keyframe poses and related features. We evaluate the proposed system on both public datasets and real-world experiments. It is demonstrated that it is comparable to or better than state-of-the-art methods in consideration with both accuracy and robustness.