SELVO: A Semantic-Enhanced Lidar-Visual Odometry

In the face of complex external environment, single sensor information can no longer meet the accuracy requirements of low-drift SLAM. In this paper, we focus on the fusion scheme of cameras and lidar, and explore the gain of semantic information to SLAM system. A Semantic-Enhanced Lidar-Visual Odometry (SELVO) is proposed to achieve pose estimation with high accuracy and robustness by applying semantics and utilizing strategies of initialization and sensor fusion. In loop closure detection thread, we propose a novel place recognition method based on semantic information to maintain the global consistency of the map. In the back-end, we design a joint optimization framework including visual odometry, lidar odometry and loop closure detection, and innovatively propose to recognize degraded scenes with semantic information. We have conducted a large number of experiments on KITTI [1] and KITTI-360 [2] dataset, and the results show that our system can achieve the high accuracy and competitive performance in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.