Space-Time Localization and Mapping

This paper addresses the problem of building a spatio-temporal model of the world from a stream of time-stamped data. Unlike traditional models for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and structure-from-motion (SfM) which focus on recovering a single rigid 3D model, we tackle the problem of mapping scenes in which dynamic components appear, move and disappear independently of each other over time. We introduce a simple generative probabilistic model of 4D structure which specifies location, spatial and temporal extent of rigid surface patches by local Gaussian mixtures. We fit this model to a time-stamped stream of input data using expectation-maximization to estimate the model structure parameters (mapping) and the alignment of the input data to the model (localization). By explicitly representing the temporal extent and observability of surfaces in a scene, our method yields superior localization and reconstruction relative to baselines that assume a static 3D scene. We carry out experiments on both synthetic RGB-D data streams as well as challenging real-world datasets, tracking scene dynamics in a human workspace over the course of several weeks.