Direct and Sparse Deformable Tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel deformable monocular SLAM method that uses local, independent surfels with a direct photometric error cost, improving accuracy and robustness in dynamic, deformable environments.

Contribution

It presents a local deformation model for each map point, moving away from global models, enabling more accurate and robust tracking of non-isometric deformations.

Findings

More accurate deformation estimation in experiments

Robust tracking in non-isometric and topologically changing environments

Effective in both laboratory and in-body scenarios

Abstract

Deformable Monocular SLAM algorithms recover the localization of a camera in an unknown deformable environment. Current approaches use a template-based deformable tracking to recover the camera pose and the deformation of the map. These template-based methods use an underlying global deformation model. In this paper, we introduce a novel deformable camera tracking method with a local deformation model for each point. Each map point is defined as a single textured surfel that moves independently of the other map points. Thanks to a direct photometric error cost function, we can track the position and orientation of the surfel without an explicit global deformation model. In our experiments, we validate the proposed system and observe that our local deformation model estimates more accurately and robustly the targeted deformations of the map in both laboratory-controlled experiments and in-body scenarios undergoing non-isometric deformations, with changing topology or discontinuities.