Appearance Based Extraction of Planar Structure in Monocular SLAM

This paper concerns the building of enhanced scene maps during real-time monocular SLAM. Specifically, we present a novel algorithm for detecting and estimating planar structure in a scene based on both geometric and appearance and information. We adopt a hypothesis testing framework, in which the validity of planar patches within a triangulation of the point based scene map are assessed against an appearance metric. A key contribution is that the metric incorporates the uncertainties available within the SLAM filter through the use of a test statistic assessing error distribution against predicted covariances, hence maintaining a coherent probabilistic formulation. Experimental results indicate that the approach is effective, having good detection and discrimination properties, and leading to convincing planar feature representations.