Salient Bundle Adjustment for Visual SLAM

Abstract: Recently, the philosophy of visual saliency and attention has started to gain popularity in the robotics community. Therefore, this paper aims to mimic this mechanism in SLAM framework by using saliency prediction model. Comparing with traditional SLAM that treated all feature points as equal important in optimization process, we think that the salient feature points should play more important role in optimization process. Therefore, we proposed a saliency model to predict the saliency map, which can capture both scene semantic and geometric information. Then, we proposed Salient Bundle Adjustment by using the value of saliency map as the weight of the feature points in traditional Bundle Adjustment approach. Exhaustive experiments conducted with the state-of-the-art algorithm in KITTI and EuRoc datasets show that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing algorithms in both indoor and outdoor environments. Finally, we will make our saliency dataset and relevant source code open-source for enabling future research.