ProSLAM: Graph SLAM from a Programmer's Perspective

TL;DR

ProSLAM is a simple, modular stereo visual SLAM system designed for ease of understanding and implementation, achieving competitive accuracy with lower computational demands.

Contribution

The paper introduces ProSLAM, a lightweight, highly modular stereo visual SLAM system emphasizing data structures and algorithms over complex mathematics.

Findings

Achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods

Requires substantially less computational resources

Open source implementation available

Abstract

In this paper we present ProSLAM, a lightweight stereo visual SLAM system designed with simplicity in mind. Our work stems from the experience gathered by the authors while teaching SLAM to students and aims at providing a highly modular system that can be easily implemented and understood. Rather than focusing on the well known mathematical aspects of Stereo Visual SLAM, in this work we highlight the data structures and the algorithmic aspects that one needs to tackle during the design of such a system. We implemented ProSLAM using the C++ programming language in combination with a minimal set of well known used external libraries. In addition to an open source implementation, we provide several code snippets that address the core aspects of our approach directly in this paper. The results of a thorough validation performed on standard benchmark datasets show that our approach achieves accuracy comparable to state of the art methods, while requiring substantially less computational resources.