Monocular-vision based SLAM using line segments

This paper presents a method to incorporate 3D line segments in vision based SLAM. A landmark initialization method that relies on the Plucker coordinates to represent a 3D line is introduced: a Gaussian sum approximates the feature initial state and is updated as new observations are gathered by the camera. Once initialized, the landmarks state is estimated along an EKF-based SLAM approach: constraints associated with the Plucker representation are considered during the update step of the Kalman filter. The whole SLAM algorithm is validated in simulation runs and results obtained with real data are presented.