Depth-hybrid speeded-up robust features (DH-SURF) for real-time RGB-D SLAM

This paper presents a novel feature detection algorithm called depth-hybrid speeded-up robust features (DH-SURF) augmented by depth information in the speeded-up robust features (SURF) algorithm. In the keypoint detection part of classical SURF, the standard deviation of the Gaussian kernel is varied for its scale-invariance property, resulting in increased computational complexity. We propose a keypoint detection method with less variation of the standard deviation by using depth data from a red-green-blue depth (RGB-D) sensor. Our approach maintains a scale-invariance property while reducing computation time. An RGB-D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system uses a feature extraction method and depth data concurrently; thus, the system is well-suited for showing the performance of the DH-SURF method. DH-SURF was implemented on a central processing unit (CPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU), respectively, and was validated through the real-time RGB-D SLAM.