High Dynamic Range SLAM with Map-Aware Exposure Time Control

TL;DR

This paper enhances dense 3D SLAM by integrating HDR color fusion and a map-aware exposure control, significantly improving texture quality and color consistency in reconstructed maps.

Contribution

It introduces a novel HDR color fusion method and a map-aware exposure time controller that optimizes color quality during SLAM.

Findings

Improved texture quality in 3D maps.

Enhanced color consistency and reduced artifacts.

Demonstrated advantages of the exposure controller in experiments.

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.