Detect-SLAM: Making Object Detection and SLAM Mutually Beneficial

Although significant progress has been made in SLAM and object detection in recent years, there are still a series of challenges for both tasks, e.g., SLAM in dynamic environments and detecting objects in complex environments. To address these challenges, we present a novel robotic vision system, which integrates SLAM with a deep neural network-based object detector to make the two functions mutually beneficial. The proposed system facilitates a robot to accomplish tasks reliably and efficiently in an unknown and dynamic environment. Experimental results show that compare to the state-of-the-art robotic vision systems, the proposed system has three advantages: i) it greatly improves the accuracy and robustness of SLAM in dynamic environments by removing unreliable features from moving objects leveraging the object detector, ii) it builds an instance-level semantic map of the environment in an online fashion using the synergy of the two functions for further semantic applications; and iii) it improves the object detector so that it can detect/recognize objects effectively under more challenging conditions such as unusual viewpoints, poor lighting condition, and motion blur, by leveraging the object map.