ADEmono-SLAM: Absolute Depth Estimation for Monocular Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping in Complex Environments

Aiming to address the problems of scale uncertainty and dynamic object interference in monocular visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), this paper proposes an absolute depth estimation network-based monocular visual SLAM method, namely, ADEmono-SLAM. Firstly, some detail features including oriented fast and rotated brief (ORB) features of input image are extracted. An object depth map is obtained through an absolute depth estimation network, and some reliable feature points are obtained by a dynamic interference filtering algorithm. Through these operations, the potential dynamic interference points are eliminated. Secondly, the absolute depth image is obtained by using the monocular depth estimation network, in which a dynamic point elimination algorithm using target detection is designed to eliminate dynamic interference points. Finally, the camera poses and map information are obtained by static feature point matching optimization. Thus, the remote points are randomly filtered by combining the depth values of the feature points. Experiments on the karlsruhe institute of technology and toyota technological institute (KITTI) dataset, technical university of munich (TUM) dataset, and mobile robot platform show that the proposed method can obtain sparse maps with absolute scale and improve the pose estimation accuracy of monocular SLAM in various scenarios. Compared with existing methods, the maximum error is reduced by about 80%, which provides an effective method or idea for the application of monocular SLAM in the complex environment.