LSD-SLAM: Large-Scale Direct Monocular SLAM

LSD-SLAM is a novel approach to real-time monocular SLAM. It is fully direct (i.e. does not use keypoints / features) and creates large-scale, semi-dense maps in real-time on a laptop. For more information see http://vision.in.tum.de/lsdslam where you can also find the corresponding publications and Youtube videos, as well as some example-input datasets, and the generated output as rosbag or .ply point cloud.

Related Papers

• LSD-SLAM: Large-Scale Direct Monocular SLAM, J. Engel, T. Schöps, D. Cremers, ECCV ‘14

• Semi-Dense Visual Odometry for a Monocular Camera, J. Engel, J. Sturm, D. Cremers, ICCV ‘13

1. Quickstart / Minimal Setup

First, install LSD-SLAM following 2.1 or 2.2, depending on your Ubuntu / ROS version. You don’t need openFabMap for now.

Download the Room Example Sequence and extract it.

Launch the lsd_slam viewer:

	rosrun lsd_slam_viewer viewer

Launch the lsd_slam main ros node:

	rosrun lsd_slam_core live_slam image:=/image_raw camera_info:=/camera_info

Play the sequence:

	rosbag play ~/LSD_room.bag

You should see one window showing the current keyframe with color-coded depth (from live_slam), and one window showing the 3D map (from viewer). If for some reason the initialization fails (i.e., after ~5s the depth map still looks wrong), focus the depth map and hit ‘r’ to re-initialize.

2. Installation

We tested LSD-SLAM on two different system configurations, using Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) and ROS fuerte, or Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) and ROS indigo. Note that building without ROS is not supported, however ROS is only used for input and output, facilitating easy portability to other platforms.

2.1 ROS fuerte + Ubuntu 12.04

Install system dependencies:

sudo apt-get install ros-fuerte-libg2o liblapack-dev libblas-dev freeglut3-dev libqglviewer-qt4-dev libsuitesparse-dev libx11-dev

In your ROS package path, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/tum-vision/lsd_slam.git lsd_slam

Compile the two package by typing:

rosmake lsd_slam

2.2 ROS indigo + Ubuntu 14.04

We do not use catkin, however fortunately old-fashioned CMake-builds are still possible with ROS indigo. For this you need to create a rosbuild workspace (if you don’t have one yet), using:

sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall
mkdir ~/rosbuild_ws
cd ~/rosbuild_ws
rosws init . /opt/ros/indigo
mkdir package_dir
rosws set ~/rosbuild_ws/package_dir -t .
echo "source ~/rosbuild_ws/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
bash
cd package_dir

Install system dependencies:

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-libg2o ros-indigo-cv-bridge liblapack-dev libblas-dev freeglut3-dev libqglviewer-dev libsuitesparse-dev libx11-dev

In your ROS package path, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/tum-vision/lsd_slam.git lsd_slam

Compile the two package by typing:

rosmake lsd_slam

2.3 openFabMap for large loop-closure detection [optional]

If you want to use openFABMAP for large loop closure detection, uncomment the following lines in lsd_slam_core/CMakeLists.txt :

#add_subdirectory(${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/thirdparty/openFabMap)
#include_directories(${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/thirdparty/openFabMap/include)

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