A Real Time Visual SLAM For RGB-D Cameras Based on Chamfer Distance and Occupancy Grid

We present a feature based visual SLAM method that uses chamfer distance to estimate the camera motion from RGB-D images. The proposed method does not require any matching which is an expensive operation and always generates false matching that affects the estimated camera motion. Our approach registers the input image iteratively by minimizing the distance between the feature points and the occupancy grid using a distance map. We demonstrate with real experiments the capability of the method to build accurate 3D map of the environment with a hand-held camera. While the system was mainly developed to work with RGB-D camera, occupancy grid representation gives the method the ability to work with various types of sensors, we show the capacity of the system to construct accurate 2D maps using telemeter data. We also discuss the similarities between the proposed approach and the traditional ICP algorithm.