RSV-SLAM: Toward Real-Time Semantic Visual SLAM in Indoor Dynamic Environments

Abstract: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) plays an important role in many robotics fields, including social robots. Many of the available visual SLAM methods are based on the assumption of a static world and struggle in dynamic environments. In the current study, we introduce a real-time semantic RGBD SLAM approach designed specifically for dynamic environments. Our proposed system can effectively detect moving objects and maintain a static map to ensure robust camera tracking. The key innovation of our approach is the incorporation of deep learning-based semantic information into SLAM systems to mitigate the impact of dynamic objects. Additionally, we enhance the semantic segmentation process by integrating an Extended Kalman filter to identify dynamic objects that may be temporarily idle. We have also implemented a generative network to fill in the missing regions of input images belonging to dynamic objects. This highly modular framework has been implemented on the ROS platform and can achieve around 22 fps on a GTX1080. Benchmarking the developed pipeline on dynamic sequences from the TUM dataset suggests that the proposed approach delivers competitive localization error in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods, all while operating in near real-time. The source code is publicly available.