Panoramic Visual SLAM Technology for Spherical Images

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology is one of the best methods for fast 3D reconstruction and mapping. However, the accuracy of SLAM is not always high enough, which is currently the subject of much research interest. Panoramic vision can provide us with a wide range of angles of view, many feature points, and rich information. The panoramic multi-view cross-imaging feature can be used to realize instantaneous omnidirectional spatial information acquisition and improve the positioning accuracy of SLAM. In this study, we investigated panoramic visual SLAM positioning technology, including three core research points: (1) the spherical imaging model; (2) spherical image feature extraction and matching methods, including the Spherical Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (SPHORB) and ternary scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithms; and (3) the panoramic visual SLAM algorithm. The experimental results show that the method of panoramic visual SLAM can improve the robustness and accuracy of a SLAM system.