Fast depth edge detection and edge based RGB-D SLAM

This paper presents a method of occluding depth edge-detection targeted towards RGB-D video streams and explores the use of these and other edge features in RGB-D SLAM. The proposed depth edge-detection approach uses prior information obtained from the previous RGB-D video frame to determine which areas of the current depth image are likely to contain edges due to image similarity. By limiting the search for edges to these areas a significant amount of computation time is saved compared to searching the entire image. Pixels belonging to both the depth and colour edges of an RGB-D image can be back projected using the depth component to form 3D point clouds of edge points. Registration between such edge point clouds is achieved using ICP and we present a realtime RGB-D SLAM system utilizing such back projected edge features. Experimental results are presented demonstrating the performance of both the proposed depth edge-detection and SLAM system using publicly available datasets.