Building 3D semantic maps for mobile robots using RGB-D camera

The wide availability of affordable RGB-D sensors changes the landscape of indoor scene analysis. Years of research on simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) have made it possible to merge multiple RGB-D images into a single point cloud and provide a 3D model for a complete indoor scene. However, these reconstructed models only have geometry information, not including semantic knowledge. The advancements in robot autonomy and capabilities for carrying out more complex tasks in unstructured environments can be greatly enhanced by endowing environment models with semantic knowledge. Towards this goal, we propose a novel approach to generate 3D semantic maps for an indoor scene. Our approach creates a 3D reconstructed map from a RGB-D image sequence firstly, then we jointly infer the semantic object category and structural class for each point of the global map. 12 object categories (e.g. walls, tables, chairs) and 4 structural classes (ground, structure, furniture and props) are labeled in the global map. In this way, we can totally understand both the object and structure information. In order to get semantic information, we compute semantic segmentation for each RGB-D image and merge the labeling results by a Dense Conditional Random Field. Different from previous techniques, we use temporal information and higher-order cliques to enforce the label consistency for each image labeling result. Our experiments demonstrate that temporal information and higher-order cliques are significant for the semantic mapping procedure and can improve the precision of the semantic mapping results.