RGB-T SLAM: A flexible SLAM framework by combining appearance and thermal information

Visual SLAM in low illumination scenes remains a considerably challenging task since the available amount of appearance information frequently stays insufficient. To tackle with this problem, we propose a novel SLAM framework by using both appearance information and thermal information, which possesses illumination-free recognizable contents, in a flexible manner. The key idea is to continuously update a RGB-T map, which contains both RGB and thermal map points to implement location and mapping. More specifically, in our SLAM system, we detect features in both RGB and thermal images and combine them together to update the RGB-T map and implement simultaneous location and mapping. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, especially under low illumination environments.