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Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: A Survey

Article in Artificial Intelligence Review · November 2015

DOI: 10.1007/s10462-012-9365-8

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Visual simultaneous localization and

mapping: a survey
Fuentes-Pacheco Jorge.
Centro Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo Tecnológico, Morelos, México.
[email protected]

Ruiz-Ascencio José.
Centro Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo Tecnológico, Morelos, México.
[email protected]

Rendón-Mancha Juan Manuel.

Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Morelos, México.
[email protected]

Abstract: Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) refers to the problem of using
images, as the only source of external information, in order to establish the position of a robot, a
vehicle, or a moving camera in an environment, and at the same time, construct a representation
of the explored zone. SLAM is an essential task for the autonomy of a robot. Nowadays, the
problem of SLAM is considered solved when range sensors such as lasers or sonar are used to
built 2D maps of small static environments. However SLAM for dynamic, complex and large scale
environments, using vision as the sole external sensor, is an active area of research. The
computer vision techniques employed in visual SLAM, such as detection, description and
matching of salient features, image recognition and retrieval, among others, are still susceptible
of improvement. The objective of this article is to provide new researchers in the field of visual
SLAM a brief and comprehensible review of the state-of-the-art.

Keywords: visual SLAM, salient feature selection, image matching, data association,
topological and metric maps.

1. Introduction
The problem of autonomous navigation of mobile robots is divided into three
main areas: localization, mapping and path planning (Cyrill 2009). Localization
consists in determining in an exact manner the current pose of the robot in an
environment (Where am I?). Mapping integrates the partial observations of the
surroundings into a single consistent model (What does the world look like?) and
path planning determines the best route in the map to navigate through the
environment (How can I reach a given location?).

Initially, mapping and localization were studied independently, later it was

recognized that they are dependent. This means that, for being precisely localized

1
in an environment, a correct map is necessary, but in order to construct a good
map it is necessary to be properly localized when elements are added to the map.
Currently, this problem is known as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
(SLAM). When cameras are employed as the only exteroceptive sensor, it is
called visual SLAM. The terms vision-based SLAM (Se et al. 2005; Lemaire et al.
2007 ) or vSLAM (Solà 2007) are also used. In this article the term visual SLAM
is used because it is the best known. Visual SLAM systems can be complemented
with information from proprioceptive sensors, with the aim of increasing accuracy
and robustness. This approach is known as visual-inertial SLAM (Jones and Soatto
2011). However, when vision is used as the only system of perception (without
making use of information extracted from the robot odometry or inertial sensors)
it can be called vision-only SLAM (Paz et al. 2008; Davison et al. 2007) or
camera-only SLAM (Milford and Wyeth 2008).

Many visual SLAM systems fail when work under the following conditions: in
external environments, in dynamic environments, in environments with too many
or very few salient features, in large scale environments, during erratic
movements of the camera and when partial or total occlusions of the sensor occur.
A key to a successful visual SLAM system is the ability to operate correctly
despite these difficulties.

Important applications of SLAM are oriented towards automatic car piloting on

unrehearsed off-road terrains (Thrun et al. 2005a); rescue tasks for high-risk or
difficult-navigation environments (Thrun 2003; Piniés 2006); planetary, aerial,
terrestrial and oceanic exploration (Olson et al. 2007; Artieda et al. 2009; Steder
et al. 2008; Johnson et al. 2010); augmented reality applications where virtual
objects are included in real-world scenes (Chekhlov et al. 2007; Klein and Murray
2007); visual surveillance systems (Mei et al. 2011); medicine (Auat et al. 2010;
Grasa et al. 2011), and so forth.

In this article a detailed study of visual SLAM is presented, as well as the most
recent contributions and diverse current problems. Previously, Durrant and Bailey
presented a tutorial divided into two parts that summarizes the SLAM problem
(Durrant and Bailey 2006; Bailey and Durrant 2006). The latter tutorial describes
works that are centered on the use of laser range-finder sensors, building 2D maps
under a probabilistic approach. Similarly, Thrun and Leonard (2008) presented an
introduction to the SLAM problem, analyzed three paradigms of solution (the first
is based on the Extended Kalman Filter, and the other two use optimization
techniques based on graphs and particle filters) and proposed a taxonomy of the
problem. Nevertheless, the above-mentioned articles are not focused on methods
using vision as the only external sensor. On the other hand, Kragic and Vincze
(2009) present a review of computer vision for robotics in a general context,
considering the visual SLAM problem but not in detail as it is intended in this
article.

This article is structured in the following way: Section 2 describes the SLAM
problem in general. In section 3, the use of cameras as the only external sensor is
discussed and the weak points of such systems are mentioned. Section 4 describes
the type of salient features that can be extracted and the descriptors used to
achieve invariance to various transformations that the images may suffer. Section
5 deals with image matching and the data association problem. Section 6 gives a
2
detailed review of the different methods to solve the visual SLAM problem and
weaknesses and strengths of each one are discussed. The different ways of
representing the observed world are described on section 7. Section 8 provides
conclusions and potential problems for further investigations. Finally, section 9
presents bibliographic references.

2. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

During the period of 1985-1990, Chatila and Laumond (1985) and Smith et al.
(1990) proposed carrying out mapping and localization in a concurrent manner.
Sometime later, this problem received the name of SLAM (Simultaneous
Localization and Mapping). The reader may refer to the tutorial of Durrant and
Bailey (Durrant and Bailey 2006; Bailey and Durrant 2006) for a detailed
description of the history of the SLAM problem. In some publications of Newman
et al. (2002) and Andrade and Sanfeliu (2002) it is also known as CML
(Concurrent Mapping and Localization). SLAM or CML is the process whereby
an entity (robot, vehicle or even a central processing unit with sensor devices
carried by a person) has the capacity for building a global map of the visited
environment and, at the same time, utilizing this map to deduce its own location at
any moment.

In order to build a map from the environment, the entity must possess sensors that
allow it to perceive and obtain measurements of the elements from the
surrounding world. These sensors are classified into exteroceptive and
proprioceptive. Among the exteroceptive sensors it is possible to find: sonar
(Tardós et al. 2002; Ribas et al. 2008), range lasers (Nüchter et al. 2007; Thrun et
al. 2006), cameras (Se et al. 2005; Lemaire et al. 2007; Davison 2003; Bogdan et
al. 2009) and global positioning systems (GPS) (Thrun et al. 2005a). All of these
sensors are noisy and have limited range capabilities. In addition, only local views
of the environment can be obtained using the first three aforementioned sensors.
Laser sensors and sonar allow precise and very dense information of the
environment structure. Nevertheless, they have the following problems: not useful
in highly cluttered environments or for recognizing objects; both are expensive,
heavy and consist of large pieces of equipment, making their use difficult for
airborne robots or humanoids. On the other hand, a GPS sensor does not work
well in narrow streets (urban canyons), under water, on other planets, and
occasionally is not available indoors.

Proprioceptive sensors allow the entity to obtain measurements like velocity,

position change and acceleration. Some examples are: encoders, accelerometers
and gyroscopes. These allow obtaining an incremental estimate of the entity’s
movements by means of a dead-reckoning navigation method (also known as
deduced-reckoning), but due to their inherent noise they are not sufficient to have
an accurate estimation of the entity’s position all the time, since errors are
cumulative.

As has been demonstrated in some investigations (Castellanos et al. 2001;

Majumder et al. 2005; Nützi et al. 2010), to maintain an accurate and robust
estimation of the robot position it is needed to use the fusion of information from
multiple sensors of perception. However, the addition of sensors increases the
3
cost, weight and power requirements of a system; therefore, it is important to
investigate how an entity may locate itself and create a map with only cameras.

3. Cameras as the only exteroceptive sensors

In the last 10 years, published articles reflect a clear tendency for using vision as
the only external sensorial perception system to solve the problem of SLAM (Paz
et al. 2008; Davison et al. 2007; Klein and Murray 2007; Sáez and Escolano 2006;
Piniés and Tardós 2008). The main reason for this tendency is attributed to the
capability for a system based on cameras to obtain range information, and also
retrieving the environment's appearance, color and texture, giving a robot the
possibility of integrating other high-level tasks like detection and recognition of
people and places. Furthermore, cameras are less expensive, lighter and have
lower power consumption. Unfortunately, there might be errors in the data due to
the following reasons: insufficient camera resolution, lighting changes, surfaces
with lack of texture, blurred images due to fast movements, among other factors.

The first works on visual navigation were based on a binocular stereo

configuration (Se et al. 2002; Olson et al. 2003). However, in many cases it is
difficult to have a device with binocular or trinocular stereo cameras due to their
high costs. An alternative is to use a pair of monocular cameras (for example
webcams), which leads to consider different aspects such as: a) the camera
synchronization through the use of hardware or software, b) the different
responses of each CCD sensor to color and luminance, and c) the mechanical
alignment according to the geometry scheme chosen (parallel or convergent axes).

Works also exist that make use of multi-camera rigs with or without overlapping
between the views (Kaess and Dellaert 2010; Carrera et al. 2011) and cameras
with special lens such as wide-angle (Davison et al. 2004) or omnidirectional
(Scaramuzza and Siegwart 2008) with the goal of increasing visual range and thus
decrease, to some extent, the cumulative error of pose estimation. Recently, RGB-
D (color images and depth maps) sensors have been used to map indoor
environments (Huang et al. 2011), proving to be a promising alternative for
SLAM applications.

Independently of the configuration used, cameras have to be calibrated (manually

off-line or automatically on-line). Calibration estimates intrinsic and extrinsic
parameters, the first depend on the camera's geometry (focal length and principal
point), while the second depend on the camera's position in space (rotation and
translation with respect to some coordinate system). The necessary parameters are
usually estimated from a set of images that contain multiple views of a
checkerboard calibration pattern, to relate the image's coordinates with the real-
world coordinates (Hartley and Zisserman 2003). Many tools exist to execute the
process of calibration, some of them are: the calibration functions of OpenCV
(2009) (based on the Zhang algorithm (Zhang 2000)), Camera Calibration
Toolbox for Matlab (Bouguet 2010), Tsai Camera Calibration Software (Willson
1995), OCamCalib Toolbox for omnidirectional cameras (Scaramuzza 2011), and
Multi-Camera Self-Calibration to calibrate several cameras (at least 3)(Svoboda
2011).

4
If the camera calibration is performed off-line, then it is assumed that the intrinsic
properties of the camera will not change during the entire period of operation of
the SLAM system. This is the most popular option, since it reduces the number of
parameters calculated online. Nevertheless, the intrinsic camera information may
change due to some environmental factors of the environment, such as humidity
or temperature. Furthermore, a robot that works in real world conditions can be hit
or damaged, which could invalidate the previously acquired calibration (Koch et
al. 2010).

Stereo configurations (binocular, trinocular or multiple cameras with their fields

of vision partially overlapped) offer the advantage of being able to easily and
accurately calculate the real 3D positions of the landmarks contained in the scene,
by means of triangulation (Hartley and Sturm 1997), which is information of
great utility in the visual SLAM problem. The works of Konolige et al.(2008;
2009) and Mei et al.(2009) represent the most current and effective binocular
stereo SLAM systems. When localization and mapping is being done with a single
camera, the map will suffer from a scale ambiguity problem (Nistér 2004; Strasdat
et al. 2010a). To obtain 3D information from a single camera, two cases exist
depending on the a priori knowledge of the camera. These are: a) with the
knowledge of the intrinsic parameters only; with this alternative the environment
structure and the extrinsic parameters are recovered with an undetermined scale-
factor. Scale is determined if the real distance between two points in space is
known; and b) where only correspondences are known; in this case, the
reconstruction is made up to a projective transformation.

The idea of utilizing one camera has become popular since the emergence of
single camera SLAM or MonoSLAM (Davison 2003). This is probably also
because it is now easier to access a single camera than a stereo pair, through cell
phones, personal digital assistants or personal computers. This monocular
approach offers a very simple, flexible and economic solution in terms of
hardware and processing times.

Monocular SLAM is a particular case of bearing-only SLAM. The latter is a

partially observable problem, where sensors do not provide sufficient information
from a simple observation to determine the depth of a landmark. This causes a
landmark initialization problem, where solutions can be divided into two
categories: delayed and undelayed (Lemaire et al. 2007; Vidal et al. 2007). A
salient feature tracking across multiple observations has to be performed to obtain
tridimensional information from a single camera.

Even though many contributions have been made to visual SLAM, there are still
many problems. The solutions proposed for the visual SLAM problem are
reviewed in section 6. Many visual SLAM systems suffer from large accumulated
errors while the environment is being explored (or fail completely in visually
complex environments), which leads to inconsistent estimates of robot position
and totally incongruous maps. Three primary reasons exist:

1) First, generally it is assumed that camera movement is smooth and that there
will be consistency in the appearance of salient features (Davison 2003; Nistér et
al. 2004), but in general this is not true. The above assumptions are highly related
to the selection of the salient feature detector and of the matching technique used.
5
This originates an inaccuracy in camera position when capturing images with little
texture or that are blurred due to rapid movements of the sensor (e.g. due to
vibration or quick direction changes) (Pupilli and Calway 2006). These
phenomena are typical when the camera is carried by a person, humanoid robots,
and quad-rotor helicopters, among others. One way of alleviating this problem to
some extent is by the use of keyframes (see Appendix I) (Mouragnon et al. 2006;
Klein and Murray 2008). Alternatively, Pretto et al. (2007) and Mei et al.(2008)
analyze the problem of visual tracking in real time over blurred image sequences
due to an out-of-focus camera.

2) Second, most of researchers assume that the environments to explore are static
and that they only contain stationary and rigid elements; the majority of the
environments contain people and objects in motion. If this is not considered, the
moving elements will originate false matches and consequently will generate
unpredictable errors in all the system. The first approaches to this problem are
proposed by Wang et al.(2007), Wangsiripitak and Murray (2009), Migliore et al.
(2009), as well as Lin and Wang (2010).

3) Third, the world is visually repetitive. There are many similar textures, such as
the repeated architectural elements, foliage and walls of brick or stone. Also some
objects such as traffic signals appear repeatedly within an urban outdoor
environment. This makes it difficult to recognize a previously explored area and
also to do SLAM on large extensions of land.

4. Salient feature selection

We will make a difference between salient features and landmarks, since in some
articles they are treated indistinctly. According to Frintop and Jensfelt (2008), a
landmark is a region in the real world described by 3D position and appearance
information. On the other hand, a salient feature is a region of the image described
by its 2D position (on the image) and an appearance. In this survey, the term
salient feature is used as a generalization that can include points, regions, or even
edge segments which are extracted from images.

The salient features that are easiest to locate, are those produced by artificial
landmarks (Frintrop and Jensfelt 2008). These landmarks are added intentionally
to the environment with the purpose of serving as an aid for navigation, e.g. red
squares or circles situated on the floor or walls. These landmarks have the
advantage that their appearance is known in advance, making them easy to detect
at any time. However, the environment has to be prepared by a person before the
system is initialized. Natural landmarks are those that exist habitually in the
environment (Se et al. 2002). For indoor environments it is common to use as
natural landmarks the corners of doors or windows. In outdoor environments, tree
trunks (Asmar 2006), regions (Matas et al. 2002), or interest points (Lowe 2004)
are used. An interest point is an image pixel with such a neighborhood that is easy
to distinguish from other points using a given detector.

One good-quality feature has the following properties: it must be notable (easy to
extract), precise (it may be measured with precision) and invariant to rotation,
translation, scale and illumination changes (Lemaire et al. 2007). Therefore, a
6
good-quality landmark has a similar appearance from different viewpoints in 3D
space. The salient feature extraction process is composed of two phases: detection
and description. The detection consists in processing the image to obtain a
number of salient elements. The description consists in building a feature vector
based on visual appearance in the image. The invariance of the descriptor to
changes in position and orientation will permit to improve the image matching
and data association processes (described in section 5).

4.1. Detectors

In the majority of SLAM systems based on vision, natural features present

everywhere have been used, such as corners, interest points, edge segments and
regions. The selection of the type of features to be used will depend largely on the
environment in which the robot is going to work.

There is a large number of salient feature detectors. Some examples are: Harris
corners detector (Harris and Stephens 1988), Harris-Laplace and Hessian-Laplace
points detectors, as well as their respective affine invariants versions Harris-
Affine and Hessian-Affine (Mikolajcczyk and Schmid 2002); Difference of
Gaussians (DoG) used on SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) (Lowe 2004);
Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSERs) (Matas 2002), FAST (Features
from Accelerated Segment Test) (Rosten and Drummond 2006) and the Fast-
Hessian used on SURF (Speeded Up Robust Features) (Bay et al. 2006).
Mikolajczyk et al.(2005) made an evaluation of the performance of these
algorithms with respect to viewpoint, zoom, rotation, out-of-focus, JPEG
compression and lighting changes. The Hessian-Affine and MSER detectors had
the best performance, MSER was the most robust with respect to viewpoint and
lighting changes, and the Hessian-Affine was the best in presence of out-of-focus
features and JPEG compression. In (Tuytelaars and Mikolajczyk 2008) these
detectors and some others are classified, taking into consideration their
repeatability, precision, robustness, efficiency and invariant characteristics.

The majority of visual SLAM systems use corners as landmarks due to their
invariant features and their wide study in the computer vision context. However,
Eade and Drummond (2006a) propose to use edge segments called edgelets in a
real-time MonoSLAM system, allowing the construction of maps with high levels
of geometrical information. The authors demonstrated that edges are good
features for tracking and SLAM, due to their invariance to lighting, orientation
and scale changes. The use of edges as features looks promising, since edges are
little affected by blurring caused by the sudden movements of the camera (Klein
and Murray 2008). Nonetheless, edges have the limitation of not being easy to
extract and match. On the other hand, Gee et al. (2008) and Martínez et al.(2010)
investigate the fusion of features (i.e. points, lines and planar structures) in a
single map, with the purpose of increasing the precision of SLAM systems and
creating a better representation of the environment.

4.2. Descriptors

One of the most commonly used descriptors for object recognition is the
histogram-type SIFT descriptor, proposed by Lowe (2004), which is based on the
7
spatial distribution of local features in the neighborhood of the salient point,
obtaining a vector of 128 components. Ke and Sukthankar (2004) propose a
modification to SIFT called PCA-SIFT, whose main idea is to obtain a descriptor
as distinctive and robust as SIFT but with a vector of less components. The
reduction is accomplished by means of the Principal Component Analysis
technique. The histogram-type descriptors have the property of being invariant to
translation, rotation, and scale, and partially invariant to lighting and viewpoint
changes. An exhaustive evaluation of several description algorithms and a
proposal for an extension of the SIFT descriptor (Gradient Location-Orientation
Histogram- GLOH) may be found in (Moreels and Perona 2005) and
(Mikolajcczyk and Schmid 2005), respectively.

In (Gil et al. 2009) appears a comparative study of different local description

algorithms focused on the visual SLAM problem. The evaluation is based on the
number of correct and incorrect matches found through video sequences with
significant changes in scale, viewpoint and lighting. In this work it is
demonstrated that SURF descriptor is superior to SIFT descriptor in terms of
robustness and computation time. Further on, the authors manifest that SIFT does
not demonstrate great stability, which means that many of the landmarks detected
from a particular position of the camera disappear when moving it slightly.
Currently there are many variants that improve the performance of the SIFT
algorithm, for example: ASIFT, which incorporates invariance to affine
transformations (Morel and Yu 2009), BRIEF (Binary Robust Independent
Elementary Features) (Calonder et al. 2010); ORB, a fast binary descriptor based
on BRIEF but rotation invariant and resistant to noise (Rublee et al. 2011); PIRF
(Position-Invariant Robust Feature) (Kawewong et al. 2010) and GPU-SIFT, an
implementation of SIFT on a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in order to make
processing in parallel and in real time (Sinha et al. 2006).

5. The image matching and data association

problems
In stereo correspondence, the image matching consists in searching for each
element in one image, its correspondent in the other image. The matching
techniques can be divided into two categories: short baseline and long baseline.
These techniques are necessary during the stage of salient features tracking and
loop closure detection in visual SLAM. In the area of robot navigation, the data
association consists in relating the sensor’s measurements with the elements
already inside the robot’s map (Neira and Tardós 2001). This problem also
involves determining if the measurements are spurious or belong to elements not
contained in the map. An efficient image matching and a correct data association
are essential to a successful navigation. The errors will rapidly lead to incorrect
maps.

5.1. Short baseline matching

Baseline is the line separating the optical centers of two cameras used to capture a
pair of images. When the difference between the images taken from different
viewpoint is small, the corresponding point will have almost the same position
8
and appearance in both images, reducing the complexity of the problem. In this
case, the point is characterized simply by the intensity values of a set of sampled
pixels from a rectangular window (also known as patch) that is centered over the
salient feature. The intensity values of the pixels are compared by means of
correlation measures like cross correlation, sum of squared differences and sum of
absolute differences, among others. In (Ciganek and Siebert 2009) there is a list of
formulae to determine the similarity between two patches. Articles (Konolige and
Agrawal 2008; Nistér et al. 2004) manifest that the measure of normalized crossed
correlation (NCC) is the one exhibiting the best results. Normalization makes this
method invariant to uniform changes in brightness. In (Davison 2003) and
(Molton et al. 2004) an homography is calculated to deform the patch and make
the correspondences with NCC invariant to viewpoints, which allows more
camera movement freedom. Unfortunately, the correspondence with NCC is
susceptible to false positives and false negatives. In an image region with repeated
texture, two o more points inside a search region can get a strong response to
NCC.

For short baseline correspondences, it is important to take into account the

dimensions of the patch as well as the dimensions of the search region, otherwise
errors will appear. For example, patches that are too little are good for speed, but
tend to generate false correspondences and too large patches require more
processing time. It is recommended to use patches of approximately 9x9 or 11x11
pixels and place the patch over a corner, since in such a region the gradient of the
image has two or more dominant directions and, consequently, facilitates the
process of correspondence. The use of descriptors is unnecessary for frame to
frame short baseline matching, but if tracking fails and the camera is lost, then it
become a great help.

A disadvantage of short baseline is that depth computation is very sensitive to

noise, e.g. error measurements of image’s coordinates, due to the reduced distance
between different viewpoints. However, it is possible to make a precise tracking
of corresponding features through video sequences. Yilmaz et al. (2006), Cannons
(2008) and Lepetit and Fua (2005) present a study of the state-of-the-art of
techniques to perform tracking based on features, contours or regions.

5.2. Long baseline matching

When working with long baselines, images present big changes in scale or
perspective, which originates that a point in an image moves to any place in the
other image. This creates a difficult correspondence problem. Data from the image
in the neighborhood of a point are distorted by changes in viewpoint and lighting,
and the correlation measures will not give good results.

The easiest way to find correspondences is to compare all the features of an image
versus all the features of some other image (approach known as “brute force”).
Unfortunately, this process grows in a quadratic manner for the number of
extracted features, which is impractical for many applications that must work in
real time.

9
In recent years, there has been considerable progress in the development of
matching algorithms for long baseline that are invariant to several transformations
of the image. Many of these algorithms obtain a descriptor for each detected
feature, calculate dissimilarity measures between descriptors and use data
structures to perform the search of pairs quickly and efficiently.

There are several dissimilarity measures, such as Euclidean distance, Manhattan

distance, Chi-Square distance, among others. The data structures can be balanced
binary trees called kd-trees (Beis and Lowe 1997; Silpa and Hartley 2008) or hash
tables (Grauman and Darrell 2007). There are also criteria for deciding when two
features must be associated (Mikolajcczyk and Schmid 2005). Some examples
are: a) distance threshold: two features are relevant if the distance between their
descriptors is below a threshold; b) nearest neighbor: A and B are related if
descriptor B is the closest neighbor of the descriptor A and if the distance between
them is below a threshold, and c) nearest neighbor distance ratio: this approach is
similar to nearest neighbor except that the threshold is applied to the ratio of
distances of the current pixel to the first and second nearest neighbor. By using
the first criterion described above, a feature of the first image can be paired with
several features of the second image and vice versa. There are different techniques
to disambiguate these candidate matches, for example: by means of relaxation
techniques (Zhang et al. 1994) or considering collections of points (Dufournaud et
al. 2004).

A geometric constraint can be used to speed up matching process. The epipolar

constraint establishes that: a necessary condition for x and x’ to be corresponding
points, is that the point x’ have to be on the epipolar line of x (Hartley and
Zisserman 2003). In this way the search for matches is restricted to a single line
instead of the whole image. Some details may be found in Tuytelaars and Van-
Gool (2004), Zhang and Kosecka (2006), and Matas et al.(2002).

Other researches like (Lepetit and Fua 2006; Grauman 2010; Kulis et al. 2009;
Özuysal et al. 2010) use learning strategies to determine similarity between
features. This re-formulates the problem of correspondence as a problem of
classification, which seems very promising. In the specific case of SLAM
applications in real time, this could not look quite adequate since it is necessary to
make a constant training on-line. Nonetheless, (Hinterstoisser et al. 2009; Taylor
and Drummond 2009) have proposed faster methods for achieving on-line
learning, which could be utilized in the future for SLAM applications.

Aguilar et al. (2009), Li et al. (2010) y Gu et al. (2010) propose a different image
correspondence approach, where points neighborhood relationships are
represented by means of a graph. Correspondent graphs are those that are the
same or similar in both images. In the same way, Sanromá et al. (2010) propose
an iterative matching algorithm based on graphs, which is used to retrieve the
pose of a mobile robot. Unfortunately, these researches are still limited because
they do not work in real time and cannot handle temporary occlusions.

Using high-quality descriptors or even different kinds of similarity measures do

not ensure to avoid false correspondences. If these correspondences are used
inside a SLAM system, important errors will be generated for camera pose and
map estimation. Therefore, it is necessary to use robust estimators as RANSAC
10
(Random Sample Consensus), PROSAC (Progressive Sample Consensus), among
others, can automatically handle false correspondences. A comparative analysis of
these estimators can be found in (Raguram et al. 2008). The main difference
between them is the way they evaluate the quality of a model. Robust estimators
are commonly used to estimate model parameters from data containing atypical
values. RANSAC estimates a global relationship adapting data, and at the same
time classifies data under inliers (data which is consistent with the relationship)
and outliers (not consistent with the relationship). Due to the ability of tolerating a
large amount of outliers, this algorithm is a popular option to solve a large variety
of estimation problems.

An alternative to RANSAC is presented by Chli and Davison (2008;2009), which

propose a Bayesian technique for frame to frame correspondence called active
matching. Active matching performs a search only in parts of the image where it
is most likely to find true positives, reducing the number of outliers and the
number of image processing operations for processing images. This algorithm
uses a guided search based on the principle of Shannon Information Theory.
Active matching presents good results facing rapid camera movements. The
limitation of this technique is its poor scalability when the number of features
increases. To solve this problem, Handa et al. (2010) propose an extension
allowing managing hundreds of features in real-time, without losing precision in
the correspondence.

A way to measure the performance of matching algorithms is by means of the

Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, or ROC curve (Fawcett 2006). This is a
graphical representation involving the computation of true positives, false
positives, false negatives and true negatives, plus positive predictive value and
accuracy. Where true positives are the number of correct matches, false negatives
are matches that were not correctly detected, false positives are matches that are
incorrect and true negatives are non-matches that were correctly rejected. In some
papers of the information retrieval literature (Manning et al. 2005), the following
two metrics are used: precision (number of correct matches divided by the total
number of found correspondences) and recall (number of correct matches divided
by the total number of expected correspondences).

5.3. Data association in visual SLAM

The data association problem in visual SLAM is supported by means of Visual

Place Recognition techniques. Data association has particular cases, as: loop
closure detection, kidnapped robot (or camera), and multi-session and cooperative
mapping; which are described in the following lines:

5.3.1. Loop closure detection

Loop closure detection consists in recognizing a place that has already been
visited in a cyclical excursion of arbitrary length (Ho and Newman 2007;
Clemente et al. 2007; Mei et al. 2010). This problem has been one of the greatest
impediments to perform large scale SLAM and recover from critical errors. From
this problem arises another one called perceptual aliasing (Angeli et al. 2008;
Cummins and Newman 2008); where two different places from the surrounding
11
are recognized as the same. This represents a problem even when using cameras
as sensors due to the repetitive features of the environment, e.g. hallways, similar
architectural elements or zones with a large quantity of bushes. A good loop
closure detection method must not return any false positive and must obtain a
minimum of false negatives.

According to Williams et al. (2009a) detection methods for loop closures in visual
SLAM can be divided into three categories: i) map to map; ii) image to image;
and iii) image to map. Categories differ mainly about where the association data
are taken from (metric map space or image space). However the ideal would be to
build a system that combines the advantages of all three categories. Loop closure
detection is an important problem for any SLAM system, and taking into account
that cameras have become a very common sensor for robotic applications, many
researchers focus on vision methods to solve it.

Ho and Newman (2007) propose to use a similarity matrix to code the

relationships of resemblance between all the possible pairs in captured images.
They demonstrate by means of a single value decomposition that it is possible to
detect loop closures, despite of the presence of repetitive and visually ambiguous
images. Eade and Drummond (2008) present a unified method to recover from
tracking failures and detect loop closures in the problem of monocular visual
SLAM in real time. They also propose a system called GraphSLAM where each
node stores landmarks and maintains estimations of the transformations relating
nodes. In order to detect failures or loop closures, they model appearance as a Bag
of Visual Words (BoVW) to find the nodes that have a similar appearance in the
current video image (see Appendix II). Angeli et al. (2008) present a method to
detect loop closures under a scheme of Bayessian filtering and a method of
incremental BoVW, where the probability to belong to a visited scene is
computed for each acquired image. Cummins and Newman (2008) propose a
probabilistic framework to recognize places, which uses only image appearance
data. Through the learning of a generative model of appearance, they demonstrate
that not only it is possible to compute the resemblance of two observations, but
also the probability that they belong to the same place; and, thus, they calculate a
probability distribution function (pdf) of the observed position. Finally, Mei et al.
(2010) propose a new topometric representation of the world, based on co-
visibility, which allows to simplify data association and improve the performance
of recognition based on appearance.

All the loop closure works described above, aim to achieve a precision of
100%.This is due to the fact that a single false positive can cause irremediable
failures during the creation of the map. In the context of SLAM, false positives
are graver than false negatives (Magnusson et al. 2009). False negatives reduce
recall percentage but have no impact on precision percentage. Thus, in order to
determine the efficiency of a loop closure detector, the recall rate should be as
high as possible, with a precision of 100%.

5.3.2. Kidnapped robot

In the problem of the kidnapped robot, robot pose in the map is determined
without previous information of its whereabouts. This case can occur if the robot

12
is put back into an already mapped zone, without the knowledge of its
displacement while it is being transported to that place, or when robot performs
blind movements due to occlusions, temporary sensor malfunction, or fast camera
movements (Eade and Drummond 2008; Chekhlov et al. 2008; Williams et al.
2007).

Checkhlov et al. (2008) propose a system capable of tolerating the uncertainty

about camera pose and recover from minor tracking failures generated by
continuous erratic movement or by occlusions. The work consists in generating a
descriptor (based on SIFT) at multiple resolutions to provide robustness in the
data association task. In addition, it uses an index based on low-order coefficients
of the Haar wavelet. Williams et al. (2007) present a re-localization module that
monitors the SLAM system, detects tracking failures, determines the camera pose
in the map landmarks framework and resumes tracking as soon as conditions have
improved. Re-localization is performed by a landmark recognition algorithm
using the randomized trees classifier technique proposed by Lepetit and Fua
(2006) and trained online through a feature harvesting technique. In this way a
high recovery rate and a rapid recognition time are obtained. To find the camera
pose, candidate poses are generated from correspondences between the current
frame and landmarks on the map. There is a selection of sets of three potential
matches, then, all the consistent poses with these sets are calculated by a three-
point algorithm. These poses are evaluated seeking consensus among the other
correspondences in the image found by RANSAC. If a pose with a large
consensus is found, that pose is assumed to be correct.

5.3.3. Multi-session and cooperative mapping

The multi-session and cooperative mapping consists in align two or more partial
maps of the environment collected by a robot in different periods of operation or
by several robots at the same time (visual cooperative SLAM) (Ho and Newman
2007; Gil et al. 2010; Vidal et al. 2011).

In the past, the problem of associating measurements with landmarks on the map
was solved through algorithms such as Nearest Neighbor, Sequential
Compatibility Nearest Neighbor and Joint Compatibility Branch and Bound
(Neira and Tardós 2001). However, these techniques are similar because they
work only if a good initial guess of the robot in the map is available (Cummins
and Newman 2008).

6. Solutions to the visual SLAM problem

The techniques used to solve the visual SLAM problem can be divided into three
main groups: a) classic ones, based on probabilistic filters, with which the system
maintains a probabilistic representation of both the pose of the robot and the
location of the landmarks in the environment, b) the techniques employing
Structure from Motion (SfM) in an incremental (causal) manner, and finally c) the
techniques inspired by biology. In the following sections some details of each of
these techniques are described.

13
 6.1. Probabilistic filters

Most SLAM solutions reported to date are based on probabilistic techniques.

Some of these are: the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), Factored Solution to
SLAM (FastSLAM), Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Expectancy Maximization
(EM) (Thrun et al. 2005b). The first two techniques listed above are the most
commonly used because they offer the best results when jointly minimize
uncertainties of the entity and the map. These approaches are successful on a
small scale, but have a limited capability to navigate in large environments or to
add information to loop closure.

A methodology for building maps in an incremental (causal) way, was first

presented in the work of Smith et al. (1990). Smith et al. (1990) introduced the
concept of stochastic map and developed a precise solution to the SLAM problem
using the Extended Kalman Filter. The EKF-based approach to SLAM is
characterized by a state vector composed of the location of the entity and some
map elements, estimated recursively from the nonlinear models of observation
and transition. The uncertainty is represented by probability density functions
(pdfs). It is supposed that the recursive propagation of the mean and covariance of
these pdfs are close to the optimal solution. The EKF has the disadvantage of
being particularly sensitive to bad associations, one incorrect measurement can
lead to the divergence of the entire filter. The complexity of EKF is quadratic with
respect to the number of landmarks on the map, being difficult to maintain large
maps. In the literature there are different methods to reduce this complexity
through techniques such as: Atlas Framework (Bosse et al. 2003), Compressed
Extended Kalman Filter (CEKF) (Guivant 2002), Sparse Extended Information
Filter (SEIF) (Thrun et al. 2002), Divide and Conquer in O(n) given by Paz et al.
(2008) or Conditionally Independent Submaps (CI-Submaps) developed by Piniés
et al. (2008).

FastSLAM was proposed by Montemerlo et al. (2002) and later improved in

(Montemerlo 2003). This method maintains an entity pose distribution as a set of
Rao-Blackwellized particles, where each particle represents a trajectory of the
entity, maintains its own map using the EKF, has an hypothesis on the association
of data (multiple hypotheses) and survives with a probability. The algorithm
consists of a particle generation process and a re-sampling process, to avoid the
degeneration of the particles over time. The computational cost of this solution is
logarithmic, O(plogn), where p is the number of particles used and n is the
number of landmarks on the map. Their main problem is that there is no way to
determine the number of particles required to accurately represent the position of
the entity. That is, many particles require a lot of memory and computing time,
but few particles lead to inaccurate results.

Davison (2003) was the first to present a real-time monocular probabilistic

system, which he called MonoSLAM. This technique of SLAM, perform
simultaneously 3D metric mapping of points and location at 30 frames per second,
using only a digital firewire (IEEE-1394) camera. It considers the complete
camera movement (6gdl): position (x, y, z) and orientation (pitch, yaw and roll).
Davison's work has the limitation of only working in confined and indoor spaces,
since it employs the EKF to estimate data.

14
MonoSLAM system uses a motion model with constant linear and angular
velocities. This represents an inconvenient due to the inability of the model to
properly dealing with sudden movements, limiting camera mobility. Therefore,
the distance that the salient features can be moved between frames is very small,
in order to ensure tracking (otherwise, it could turn out to be very expensive, since
a large region to search for features is proposed).

To face erratic movement of the camera with MonoSLAM, Gemeiner et al. (2008)
developed an optimized version, capable of operating at 200 Hz using an extended
motion model that takes into account acceleration, and linear and angular
velocties; however, its performance in real time is limited to only a few seconds,
because the map size and the computational cost grow extremely fast.

To increase the number of maintained landmarks on the map, Eade and

Drummond (2006b) used a particle filter technique inspired by the method
proposed by Montemerlo et al. (2003), FastSLAM. The method of Eade and
Drummond is able to track up to 30 features per video frame and maintain dense
maps of thousands of landmarks. Clemente et al. (2007) propose an alternative to
use the MonoSLAM in large outdoor environments. This approach is based on a
hierarchical mapping technique and a robust data association algorithm based on
Geometric Constraints Branch and Bound (GCBB) capable of performing large
loops closure (250 m approx.).

As mentioned above, one problem in the monocular visual SLAM is the

initialization of the landmarks, because their depth cannot be calculated from a
single observation. For this, Davison (2003) uses a delayed initialization
technique, while Montiel et al. (2006) propose a technique called inverse depth
parametrization, which performs an undelayed landmark initialization in an EKF-
SLAM system from the first moment they are detected.

6.2. Structure from motion

Structure from Motion (SfM) techniques allow to compute 3D structure of the

scene and camera position from a set of images (Pollefeys et al. 2004). SfM has
its origins in photogrammetry and computer vision. The standard procedure
(carried out off-line) is to extract salient features of incoming images, to match
them and perform a non-linear optimization called Bundle Adjustment (BA) to
minimize the re-projection error (Triggs et al. 1999; Engels et al. 2006).

SfM allows a high precision in the location of the cameras but does not
necessarily intend to create consistent maps. Despite this, several proposals have
been made using SFM to locate with precision while creating a good
representation of the environment.

One method to solve the problem of SfM incrementally is the visual odometry
published by Nistér et al. (2004). Visual odometry consist in determine
simultaneously the camera pose for each video frame and the position of features
in 3D world, using only images in a causal way and in real time. Mouragnon et al.
(2006; 2009) uses a visual odometry similar to Nister’s proposal, but adding a
technique called Local Bundle Adjustment, reporting trajectories up to 500

15
meters. The visual odometry allow to work with thousands of features per frame,
while probabilistic techniques handle only few features.

Klein and Murray (2007) present a monocular method called Parallel Tracking
and Mapping (PTaM). It uses an approach based on keyframes (see Appendix I)
with two parallel processing threads. The first thread of execution perform the
task of robustly tracking a lot of features, while the other one produces a 3D point
map aided by BA techniques. PTaM system presents tracking failures in presence
of similar textures and moving objects.

In (Konolige et al. 2008) and (Konolige et al. 2009) the authors use a technique
called FrameSLAM and View-Based Maps, respectively. The two methods are
based on making a representation of the map as a "skeleton" consisting of a non-
linear constraint graph between frames (rather than individual 3D features). The
authors use a stereo device mounted on a wheeled robot. Their results show a
good performance on long trajectories (approximately 10 km) under changing
conditions such as passing through an urban environment.

Recently Strasdat et al. (2010b) have recognized that in order to increase accuracy
of the position of a monocular SLAM system it is recommended to increase the
number of features (essential property of SfM) rather than the number of frames;
as well as, that Bundle Adjustment optimization techniques are better than filters.
However, they manifest that the filter might be beneficial in situations of high
uncertainty. The ideal SLAM system would exploit the benefits of both SfM
techniques and probabilistic filters.

6.3. Bio-inspired models

Milford et al. (2004) use models of the hippocampus (responsible for spatial
memory) of rodents to create a location and mapping system called RatSLAM.
RatSLAM can generate consistent and stable representations of complex
environments using a single camera. The experiments carried out in (Milford and
Wyeth 2008; Glover et al. 2010) shows a good performance in real-time tasks in
both indoor and outdoor environments. In addition it has the ability to close more
than 51 loops of up to 5 km in length and at different hours of day. In (Milford
2008) a larger study of RatSLAM and other biological and navigation systems of
bees, ants, primates and humans is presented.

Collett (2010) examines the behavior of ants in desert to analyze how they are
guided by visual landmarks and not pheromone trails. Although this research
focuses on understanding how ants navigate using visual information, the author
states that the proposed solution would be viable and easy to implement in a
robot.

7. Representation of the observed world

Mapping is nowadays a very active research area. Free and occupied environment
spaces (obstacles) are represented on maps by means of a geometric
representation. There are different types of maps reported in the literature, broadly

16
divided in metric and topological maps. Metric maps capture the geometric
properties of the environment, whereas topological maps describe the connectivity
between different locations.

In the metric maps category it can be considered the occupancy grid maps
(Gutmann et al. 2008) and landmark-based maps (Klein and Murray 2007; Se et
al. 2002; Sáez and Escolano 2006; Mouragnon et al. 2006). Grid maps model free
and occupied space by means of a discretization of the environment in form of
cells, which may contain 2D, 2.5D o 3D information. Landmark-based maps
identify and keep the location 3D of certain salient features in the environment.
Thrun (2002) performs a detailed study on the topic of robotic mapping using
probabilistic techniques in indoor environments.

With representation through landmarks, only isolated landmarks from the

structure of the environment are captured, minimizing thus, the memory resources
and computation costs. Due to the foregoing, these types of maps are not ideal for
obstacle avoidance or path planning, since the lack of a landmark in a place does
not imply that the space is free. However, when the determination of the pose of
the entity is more important than the map, these representations are the most
suitable.

Topological maps represent the environment as a list of significant places that are
connected by arcs (similar to a graph) (Fraundorfer et al. 2007; Eade and
Drummond 2008; Konolige et al. 2009; Botterill et al. 2010). A representation of
the world based on graphs simplifies the problem of mapping large extensions.
However, it is necessary to perform a global optimization of the map to reduce
local error (Frese et al. 2005; Olson et al. 2006). A tutorial to formulate the SLAM
problem by means of graphs can be consulted in (Grisetti et al. 2010). Other
relevant schemes based on graphs are the following: Konolige et al. (2008; 2009)
built a sequence of relative poses between frames, which can recover from critical
errors. They show results over 10 km trajectories using stereo vision, although it
requires positions generated by an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) sensor when
an occlusion of the cameras occurs. The authors state that their scheme is
applicable to monocular SLAM, even though it is not demonstrated. Another
alternative is presented by Mei et al. (2009), which manages to maintain a
constant complexity in time to optimize local sub-maps consisting of the closest
nodes using a technique called relative bundle adjustment. They generate a
trajectory of approximately two kilometers, through stereo cameras.

One limitation of the topological representation is the lack of metric information,

thus it is impossible to use the map for the purpose of guiding a robot.
Consequently, Bazeille and Filliat (2010), Angeli et al. (2009) and Konolige et al.
(2011) propose strategies for mixing metric and topological information in a
single consistent model.

Currently, the most promising environment representations are based on graphs.

But there are still a number of challenges to be overcome, as the ability to edit the
graph when detecting wrong estimations of the position, or the generation of
global maps of very large dimensions (lifelong mapping).

17
Several datasets containing real image sequences for the evaluation of visual
SLAM systems are described in Appendix III.

The key characteristics of some visual SLAM systems reviewed in this paper are
summarized in Table 1. The first column provides the author name and its
respective reference number while the other columns provide the most important
elements of each system. Specifically, we report: 2) the type of sensing device
used, 3) the core of the visual SLAM solution; 4) the kind of environment
representation; 5) details of the feature extraction process; 6) the ability and
robustness of the system to operate under a variety of conditions: moving objects,
abrupt movements and large environments, and also to perform loop closures, and
7) the type of environment used to test the performance of the system.

8. Conclusions
This work verifies that there is a great concern to solve the SLAM problem using
vision as the only exteroceptive sensor. This is due mainly to the fact that a
camera is an ideal sensor, since it is light, passive, has low-energy consumption,
and captures abundant and distinctive information of a scene. However, the use of
vision requires reliable algorithms with good performance and consistent under
variable light conditions, occlusions or changes in appearance of the environment
due to moving people or objects, the apparition of featureless regions, transitions
between day and night or any other unforeseen situation. Therefore, SLAM
systems using vision as the only sensor are still a challenging and promising
research area.

Image matching and the data association are still open research areas in the fields
of computer vision and robotic vision respectively. The detector and the descriptor
chosen directly affect the performance of the system to track the salient features,
recognize areas previously seen, build a consistent model of the environment, and
work in real time. Particular to data association is the need for navigation in the
long term, in spite of a growing data base and changing and extremely loopy
environments. The acceptance of a bad association will cause serious errors in the
entire SLAM system, meaning that both the computation of location and map
construction will be inconsistent. Therefore, it is important to propose new
strategies to reduce the rate of false positives.

Appearance based methods have been very popular for solving data association
problem in visual SLAM. The most common technique in this category is the
BoVW, due to its speed to find similar images. However, the BoVW is affected
by the phenomenon of perceptual aliasing. Likewise, this technique has not been
yet thoroughly tested to detect images with large variations of viewpoint or scale,
which are transformations that often occur during the loop closure detection, the
kidnapped robot problem and multi-session and cooperative mapping. Also, it
does not take into account the spatial distribution between the detected features
and 3D geometric information, which could be useful when establishing
associations.

18
Although there have been several proposals to build lifelong maps, this issue
remains a topic of interest, as well as the ability to build maps in spite of all the
problems caused by working in real world environments.

To date, there are no standards for evaluating and comparing the general
efficiency and effectiveness of a complete visual SLAM system. Nonetheless,
there are several indicators that may characterize their performance, such as the
degree of human intervention, accuracy of location, map consistency, real time
operation and the control of computational cost that arises with the growth of the
map, among others.

Appendix I – Keyframes

A keyframe is a video frame that is different enough from its predecessor in the
sequence, to represent a new location. Keyframes are also used to estimate
efficiently the pose of the camera and reduce the redundancy of information. The
easiest way to classify a video frame as a keyframe is to compare a video frame
with respect to another taken earlier, selecting those that maximize both the
distance at which they were captured and the number of feature matches that exist
between them. In (Zhang et al. 2010) a comparative study of different techniques
to detect keyframes oriented to the visual SLAM problem is presented.

Appendix II – Bag of Visual Words (BoVW)

Recently, most contributions to solve data association in visual SLAM use BoVW
(Sivic and Zisserman 2003) and its improved version called Vocabulary tree
(Nistér and Stewenius 2006). The BoVW has seen a great success in the area of
information retrieval (Manning et al. 2008) and content-based image retrieval
developed by the computer vision community, due to its speed in finding similar
images. However, this technique is not completely precise because it detects
several false positives. To solve this problem to some extent, spatial information
is normally introduced in the last phase of retrieval, conducting a post-verification
taking into account the epipolar constraint (Angeli et al. 2008) or, recently, by
means of Conditional Random Fields (Cadena et al. 2010). This verification
allows rejecting those recovered images that are not geometrically consistent with
the image of reference.

The classic model of BoVW describes images as a set of local features called
visual words and the full set of these words is known as visual vocabulary. Many
BoVW schemes generate an off-line vocabulary by means of a K-means
clustering (but any other can be used) of descriptors from a large corpus of
training images (Ho and Newman 2007; Cummins and Newman 2008). An
alternative and more effective approach is to dynamically construct the
vocabulary from the features that are found as the environment is explored. Such a
scheme is described by Angeli et al. (2008) and Botterill et al. (2010).

Some visual words are more useful than others to identify if two images show the
same place. The most common scheme to assign each word a specific weight is
the TF-IDF. It combines the importance of the words in the image (TF- Term
Frequency) and the importance of the words in the collection (IDF- Inverse
19
Document Frequency). In addition, there are other schemes, which are divided
into local (Squared TF, Frequency logarithm, Binary, BM25 TF, among others)
and global (Probabilistic IDF, Squared IDF, etc.) (Tirilly et al. 2010). An inverted
index is used to speed up queries, which organizes the entire set of visual words
representing images. An inverted index is structured as a book index. It has one
entry for each word of the image collection, followed by a list of all the images in
which the word is present.

Appendix III -- Datasets to test visual SLAM systems

Some public datasets available to test the visual SLAM systems are: a) New
College and City Centre Datasets (outdoor) (Cummins 2008), used by Cummins
and Newman (2008); b) The New College Vision and Laser Data Set (outdoor)
(Smith 2012), captured by Smith et al. (2009); c) Bovisa (outdoor) and Bicocca
(indoor) Datasets of Rawseeds project (Rawseeds 2012), captured by Ceriani et
al. (2009); d) The Cheddar Gorge Data Set (outdoor), captured by Simpson et al.
(2011) and RGB-D datasets (indoor)(Sturm 2012)(Sturm et al. 2011).

Acknowledgments

This paper has been made possible thanks to the generous support from the following
institutions which we are pleased to acknowledge: CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y
Tecnología) and CENIDET (Centro Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo Tecnológico).

20
 Table 1. Summary of some systems reviewed.

Cope with
Type of sensing Feature extraction Type of
Author Core of the solution Type of map loop the kidnappe
device moving large-scale environment
closure d robot probl
Detector Descriptor objects? mapping?
events? em?
Shi and Tomasi
(Davison 2003) Monocular camera MonoSLAM (EKF) Metric Image Patches No No No No Indoor
Operator
(Nister et al. Stereo or monocular
Visual Odometry Metric Harris corners Image Patches No No No No Outdoor
2004) cameras
(Sáez and Global Entropy Minimization
Stereo Camera Metric Nitzberg Operator Image Patches No No No No Outdoor/Indoor
Escolano 2006) Algorithm
(Mouragnon et Visual Odometry +Local
Monocular Camera Metric Harris corners Image Patches Yes No No Yes Outdoor/Indoor
al. 2006) Bundle Adjustment
Parallel Tracking and
(Klein and
Monocular Camera Mapping ( Visual Odometry Metric Fast-10 Image Patches No No No No Indoor
Murray 2007)
+ Bundle Adjustment)
(Ho and Monocular Camera Harris Affine
Delayed State Formulation Metric 128D SIFT No Yes No Yes Outdoor/Indoor
Newman 2007) and laser Regions
(Clemente et al. Shi and Tomasi
Monocular Camera Hierarchical Map +EKF Metric Image Patches Yes Yes No Yes Outdoor
2007) Operator
(Lemaire et al. Stereo or monocular
EKF Metric Harris corners Image Patches No Yes No No Outdoor
2007) cameras
RatSLAM (models of the
(Milford, 2008) Monocular Camera Topological Appearance-based matching Yes Yes Yes Yes Outdoor
rodent Hippocampus)
(Scaramuzza
Omnidirectional SIFT(Difference
and Siegwart Visual Odometry Metric Image Patches No No No Yes Outdoor
camera of Gaussians)
2008)
(Eade and
Scale Space
Drummond Monocular Camera GraphSLAM Topological 16D SIFT Yes Yes Yes Yes Outdoor/Indoor
Extrema Detector
2008)
(Paz et al. Conditionally Independent Shi and Tomasi
Stereo Camera Metric Image Patches No No No Yes Outdoor/Indoor
2008) Divide and Conquer (EKF) Operator
128D SIFT +
(Angeli et al. Topological + SIFT(Difference
Monocular Camera EKF Local Hue No Yes No No Indoor
2008) Metric of Gaussians)
histograms
Monocular Camera
(Cummins and Fast Appearance Based
mounted on a pan- Topological Harris-Affine U-SURF 128D Yes Yes No Yes Outdoor
Newman 2008) Mapping (FAB-MAP)
tilt
(Piniés and Conditionally Independent
Monocular Camera Metric Harris corners Image Patches Yes Yes No Yes Outdoor
Tardós 2009) Local Maps (EKF)
(Konolige et Stereo Camera Visual Odometry + Sparse Random tree
Topological Fast Yes Yes Yes Yes Outdoor
al., 2009) +IMU Bundle adjustment signatures
(Williams Hierarchical Map + EKF + Image Patches+
Monocular Camera Metric Fast Yes Yes Yes Yes Outdoor
2009b) Visual Odometry 16D SIFT
(Kaess and Expectation Maximization +
Multi-camera rig Metric Harris corners Image Patches No Yes No No Outdoor
Dellaert 2010) Standard Bundle Adjustment
(Botterill et al. Odometría visual + Bag of
Monocular Camera Topological Fast Image Patches Yes Yes Yes Yes Outdoor/Indoor
2010) words
Visual Odometry +Relative
(Mei et al. Topological +
Stereo Camera Bundle adjustment+ FAB- Fast 128D SIFT Yes Yes Yes Yes Outdoor
2010) Metric
MAP

21
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