Real-time monocular 3D perception with ORB-Features

Purpose This paper aims to propose a new solution for real-time 3D perception with monocular camera. Most of the industrial robots' solutions use active sensors to acquire 3D structure information, which limit their applications to indoor scenarios. By only using monocular camera, some state of art method provides up-to-scale 3D structure information, but scale information of corresponding objects is uncertain. Design/methodology/approach First, high-accuracy and scale-informed camera pose and sparse 3D map are provided by leveraging ORB-SLAM and marker. Second, for each frame captured by a camera, a specially designed depth estimation pipeline is used to compute corresponding 3D structure called depth map in real-time. Finally, depth map is integrated into volumetric scene model. A feedback module has been designed for users to visualize intermediate scene surface in real-time. Findings The system provides more robust tracking performance and compelling results. The implementation runs near 25 Hz on mainstream laptop based on parallel computation technique. Originality/value A new solution for 3D perception is using monocular camera by leveraging ORB-SLAM systems. Results in our system are visually comparable to active sensor systems such as elastic fusion in small scenes. The system is also both efficient and easy to implement, and algorithms and specific configurations involved are introduced in detail.