Keeping Less is More: Point Sparsification for Visual SLAM

TL;DR

This paper introduces a graph optimization method for point sparsification in visual SLAM, reducing memory and computation while maintaining or improving pose accuracy.

Contribution

It formulates a novel maximum pose-visibility and spatial diversity problem as a minimum-cost maximum-flow graph optimization for SLAM point selection.

Findings

Achieves more accurate camera poses with fewer map points.

Reduces computation by approximately 50%.

Works as an add-on for existing SLAM systems.

Abstract

When adapting Simultaneous Mapping and Localization (SLAM) to real-world applications, such as autonomous vehicles, drones, and augmented reality devices, its memory footprint and computing cost are the two main factors limiting the performance and the range of applications. In sparse feature based SLAM algorithms, one efficient way for this problem is to limit the map point size by selecting the points potentially useful for local and global bundle adjustment (BA). This study proposes an efficient graph optimization for sparsifying map points in SLAM systems. Specifically, we formulate a maximum pose-visibility and maximum spatial diversity problem as a minimum-cost maximum-flow graph optimization problem. The proposed method works as an additional step in existing SLAM systems, so it can be used in both conventional or learning based SLAM systems. By extensive experimental evaluations we demonstrate the proposed method achieves even more accurate camera poses with approximately 1/3 of the map points and 1/2 of the computation.