Marker-based Visual SLAM leveraging Hierarchical Representations

Fiducial markers can encode rich information about the environment and aid Visual SLAM (VSLAM) approaches in reconstructing maps with practical semantic information. Current marker-based VSLAM approaches mainly utilize markers for improving feature detection in low-feature environments and/or incorporating loop closure constraints, generating only low-level geometric maps of the environment prone to inaccuracies in complex environments. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a VSLAM approach utilizing a monocular camera and fiducial markers to generate hierarchical representations of the environment while improving the camera pose estimate. The proposed approach detects semantic entities from the surroundings, including walls, corridors, and rooms encoded within markers, and appropriately adds topological constraints among them. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms a traditional marker-based VSLAM baseline in terms of accuracy, despite adding new constraints while creating enhanced map representations. Furthermore, it shows satisfactory results when comparing the reconstructed map quality to the one reconstructed using a LiDAR SLAM approach.