ISFM-SLAM: dynamic visual SLAM with instance segmentation and feature matching.

Introduction: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a technology used in intelligent systems such as robots and autonomous vehicles. Visual SLAM has become a more popular type of SLAM due to its acceptable cost and good scalability when applied in robot positioning, navigation and other functions. However, most of the visual SLAM algorithms assume a static environment, so when they are implemented in highly dynamic scenes, problems such as tracking failure and overlapped mapping are prone to occur.

Methods: To deal with this issue, we propose ISFM-SLAM, a dynamic visual SLAM built upon the classic ORB-SLAM2, incorporating an improved instance segmentation network and enhanced feature matching. Based on YOLACT, the improved instance segmentation network applies the multi-scale residual network Res2Net as its backbone, and utilizes CIoU_Loss in the bounding box loss function, to enhance the detection accuracy of the segmentation network. To improve the matching rate and calculation efficiency of the internal feature points, we fuse ORB key points with an efficient image descriptor to replace traditional ORB feature matching of ORB-SLAM2. Moreover, the motion consistency detection algorithm based on external variance values is proposed and integrated into ISFM-SLAM, to assist the proposed SLAM systems in culling dynamic feature points more effectively.

Results and discussion: Simulation results on the TUM dataset show that the overall pose estimation accuracy of the ISFM-SLAM is 97% better than the ORB-SLAM2, and is superior to other mainstream and state-of-the-art dynamic SLAM systems. Further real-world experiments validate the feasibility of the proposed SLAM system in practical applications.