Scaled monocular SLAM for walking people

Abstract

In this paper we present a full-scaled real-time monocular SLAM using only a wearable camera. Assuming that the person is walking, the perception of the head oscillatory motion in the initial visual odometry estimate allows for the computation of a dynamic scale factor for static windows of N camera poses. Improving on this method we introduce a consistency test to detect non-walking situations and propose a sliding window approach to reduce the delay in the update of the scaled trajectory. We evaluate our approach experimentally on a unscaled visual odometry estimate obtained with a wearable camera along a path of 886 m. The results show a significant improvement respect to the initial unscaled estimate with a mean relative error of 0.91% over the total trajectory length.