Monocular Vision based Topological Map Generation in Real-time

Abstract

In this work, a topological map generation algorithm has been proposed, using global descriptors. A topological map is a graphical data structure where each node signifies a fixed position in space. These nodes are connected by links which ensure the presence of a physical path between the pair. A vision based topological map generation algorithm has been addressed in this work. A sequence of monocular images taken in regular intervals has been used as an input of the mapping algorithm. Descriptors were computed from those images to represent the signature of the corresponding position. A KD-tree has been maintained to store these features in the memory. A correction algorithm has also been developed to rectify false matches based on the nature of the observations. Experiments have been performed on some of the popular benchmark datasets available in the literature.