Space-Time Localization and Mapping
icon 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.

Download: pdf

Text Reference

Minhaeng Lee and Charless C. Fowlkes. Space-time localization and mapping. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. 2017.

BibTeX Reference

@INPROCEEDINGS{LeeF_ICCV_2017,
    author = "Lee, Minhaeng and Fowlkes, Charless C.",
    booktitle = "IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision",
    title = "Space-Time Localization and Mapping",
    year = "2017",
    tag = "geometry"
}