High Dynamic Range SLAM with Map-Aware Exposure Time Control

Abstract: The research in dense online 3D mapping is mostly focused on the geometrical accuracy and spatial extent of the reconstructions. Their color appearance is often neglected, leading to inconsistent colors and noticeable artifacts. We rectify this by extending a state-of-the-art SLAM system to accumulate colors in HDR space. We replace the simplistic pixel intensity averaging scheme with HDR color fusion rules tailored to the incremental nature of SLAM and a noise model suitable for off-the-shelf RGB-D cameras. Our main contribution is a map-aware exposure time controller. It makes decisions based on the global state of the map and predicted camera motion, attempting to maximize the information gain of each observation. We report a set of experiments demonstrating the improved texture quality and advantages of using the custom controller that is tightly integrated in the mapping loop.