Distributed multi-camera visual mapping using topological maps of planar regions

This paper presents a multi-agent solution for cooperative visual mapping using planar regions. Each agent is assumed to be equipped with a conventional camera and has limited communication capabilities. Our approach starts building topological maps from independent image sequences where natural landmarks extracted from conventional images are grouped to create a graph of planes. With this approach the features observed in several images belonging to the same planar region are stored only once, reducing the size of the individual maps. In a distributed scenario this is very important because smaller maps can be transmitted faster, which makes our approach better suited for cooperative mapping. The later fusion of the individual maps is obtained via distributed consensus without any initial information about the relations between the different maps. Experiments with real images in complex scenarios show the good performance of our proposal.

Research highlights
► We present a multi-agent solution for cooperative visual mapping using planar regions.
► Our approach builds topological maps from natural landmarks grouped in planes.
► The method is fully distributed and independent of the communication topology.
► The benefits of our approach are shown in a variety of scenarios with real images.