SeMLaPS: Real-time Semantic Mapping with Latent Prior Networks
and Quasi-Planar Segmentation

RA-L 2023, ICRA 2024


Jingwen Wang1,2, Juan Tarrio1, Lourdes Agapito2, Pablo F. Alcantarilla1, Alexander Vakhitov1

1Slamcore LTD   2University College London (UCL)  


Paper (ArXiv)
Video (Youtube)
Video (bilibili)
Code (soon)
Data (soon)

The availability of real-time semantics greatly improves the core geometric functionality of SLAM systems, enabling numerous robotic and AR/VR applications. We present a new methodology for real-time semantic mapping from RGB-D sequences that combines a 2D neural network and a 3D network based on a SLAM system with 3D occupancy mapping. When segmenting a new frame we perform latent feature re-projection from previous frames based on differentiable rendering. Fusing re-projected feature maps from previous frames with current-frame features greatly improves image segmentation quality, compared to a baseline that processes images independently. For 3D map processing, we propose a novel geometric quasi-planar over-segmentation method that groups 3D map elements likely to belong to the same semantic classes, relying on surface normals. We also describe a novel neural network design for lightweight semantic map post-processing. Our system achieves state-of-the-art semantic mapping quality within 2D-3D networks-based systems and matches the performance of 3D convolutional networks on three real indoor datasets, while working in real-time. Moreover, it shows better cross-sensor generalization abilities compared to 3D CNNs, enabling training and inference with different depth sensors.

Bibtex


@article{wang2023semlaps, title={SeMLaPS: Real-time Semantic Mapping with Latent Prior Networks and Quasi-Planar Segmentation}, author={Wang, Jingwen and Tarrio, Juan and Agapito, Lourdes and Alcantarilla, Pablo F and Vakhitov, Alexander}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.16585}, year={2023} }

Acknowledgement


This work was done during Jingwen's internship at Slamcore LTD. Jingwen Wang is funded by the UCL Centre for Doctoral Training in Foundational AI under UKRI grant number EP/S021566/1. We also thank authors of INS-Conv for providing additional details on evaluation protocol.