Towards a benchmark for RGB-D SLAM evaluation

Jürgen Sturm1 Stéphane Magnenat2 Nikolas Engelhard3 François Pomerleau2

Francis Colas2 Daniel Cremers1 Roland Siegwart2 Wolfram Burgard3

Abstract— We provide a large dataset containing RGB-D

image sequences and the ground-truth camera trajectories
with the goal to establish a benchmark for the evaluation
of visual SLAM systems. Our dataset contains the color and
depth images of a Microsoft Kinect sensor and the ground-
truth trajectory of camera poses. The data was recorded at
full frame rate (30 Hz) and sensor resolution (640x480). The
ground-truth trajectory was obtained from a high-accuracy
motion-capture system with eight high-speed tracking cameras
(100 Hz). Further, we provide the accelerometer data from (a) Typical office scene (b) Motion capture system
the Kinect. Finally, we propose an evaluation criterion for
measuring the quality of the estimated camera trajectory of
visual SLAM systems.

I. I NTRODUCTION

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has a

long history in robotics and computer-vision research [11], (c) Microsoft Kinect sensor (d) Checkerboard with reflective
[6], [1], [15], [7], [4]. Different sensor modalities have been with reflective markers markers used for calibration
explored in the past, including 2D laser scanners [12], [3], Fig. 1: The office environment and the experimental setup
3D scanners [14], [16], monocular cameras [13], [7], [9], in which the RGB-D dataset with ground truth camera poses
[19], [20] and stereo systems [8]. Recently, low-cost RGB- was recorded.
D sensors became available, of which the most prominent
one is the Microsoft Kinect. Such sensors provide both color
images and dense depth maps at video frame rates. Henry et
II. E XPERIMENTAL S ETUP AND DATA ACQUISITION
al. [5] were the first to use the Kinect sensor in a 3D SLAM
system. Others have followed [2], and we expect to see more We acquired a large set of data recordings containing
approaches using RGB-D data for visual SLAM in the near both the RGB-D data from the Kinect and the ground truth
future. estimates from the mocap system. We moved the Kinect
Various datasets and benchmarks have been proposed for along different trajectories in typical office environments
laser- and camera-based SLAM, such as the Freiburg, Intel (see Fig. 1a). The recordings differ in their translational
and Newcollege datasets [18], [17]. However until now, no and angular velocities (fast/slow movements) and the size
suitable dataset or benchmark existed that can be used to of the environment (one desk, several desks, whole room).
evaluate, measure, and compare the performance of RGB- We also acquired data for three specific trajectories for
D SLAM systems. As we consider objective evaluation debugging purposes, i.e., we moved the Kinect (more or less)
methods to be highly important for measuring progress in the individually along the x/y/z-axes and rotated it individually
field (and demonstrating this in a verifiable way), we decided around the x/y/z-axes.
to provide such a dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this We captured both the color and depth images from an
is the first RGB-D dataset for visual SLAM benchmarking. off-the-shelf Microsoft Kinect sensor using PrimeSense’s
OpenNI-driver. All data was logged at full resolution
1 Jürgen Sturm and Daniel Cremers are with the Computer Vision and
(640×480) and full frame rate (30 Hz) of the sensor on a
Pattern Recognition Group, Computer Science Department, Technical Uni- Linux laptop running Ubuntu 10.10 and ROS Diamondback.
versity of Munich, Germany. {sturmju,cremers}@in.tum.de Further, we recorded IMU data from the accelerometer in
2 S. Magnenat, F. Pomerlau, F. Colas and R. Seigwart are
the Kinect at 500 Hz and also read out the internal sensor
with the Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
{stephane.magnenat,francis.colas}@mavt.ethz.ch parameters from the Kinect factory calibration.
and [email protected] Further, we obtained the camera trajectory by using an
3 Nikolas Engelhard and Wolfram Burgard are with external motion capturing system from MotionAnalysis at
the Autonomous Intelligent Systems Lab, Computer
Science Department, University of Freiburg, Germany. 100 Hz (see Fig. 1b). We attached reflective targets to the
{engelhar,burgard}@informatik.uni-freiburg.de Kinect (see Fig. 1c) and used a modified checkerboard for
calibration (Fig. 1d) to obtain the transformation between the and evaluations. In this way, we hope to detect (and resolve)
optical frame of the Kinect sensor and the coordinate system potential problems present in our current dataset, such as
of the motion capture system. Finally, we also video-taped calibration and synchronization issues between the Kinect
all recordings with an external video camera to capture the and our mocap system as well as the effects of motion blur
camera motion and the environment from a different view and the rolling shutter of the Kinect. Furthermore, we want
point. to investigate ways to measure the performance of a SLAM
The original data has been recorded as a ROS bag file. system not only in terms of the accuracy of the estimated
In total, we collected 50 GB of Kinect data, divided into camera trajectory, but also in terms of the quality of the
separate nine sequences. The dataset is available online under resulting map of the environment.
the Creative Commons Attribution license at
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