DK-SLAM: Monocular Visual SLAM with Deep Keypoint Learning, Tracking, and Loop Closing

The performance of visual SLAM in complex, real-world scenarios is often compromised by unreliable feature extraction and matching when using handcrafted features. Although deep learning-based local features excel at capturing high-level information and perform well on matching benchmarks, they stru...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hao Qu, Lilian Zhang, Jun Mao, Junbo Tie, Xiaofeng He, Xiaoping Hu, Yifei Shi, Changhao Chen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-07-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/15/14/7838
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The performance of visual SLAM in complex, real-world scenarios is often compromised by unreliable feature extraction and matching when using handcrafted features. Although deep learning-based local features excel at capturing high-level information and perform well on matching benchmarks, they struggle with generalization in continuous motion scenes, adversely affecting loop detection accuracy. Our system employs a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) strategy to optimize the training of keypoint extraction networks, enhancing their adaptability to diverse environments. Additionally, we introduce a coarse-to-fine feature tracking mechanism for learned keypoints. It begins with a direct method to approximate the relative pose between consecutive frames, followed by a feature matching method for refined pose estimation. To mitigate cumulative positioning errors, DK-SLAM incorporates a novel online learning module that utilizes binary features for loop closure detection. This module dynamically identifies loop nodes within a sequence, ensuring accurate and efficient localization. Experimental evaluations on publicly available datasets demonstrate that DK-SLAM outperforms leading traditional and learning-based SLAM systems, such as ORB-SLAM3 and LIFT-SLAM. DK-SLAM achieves 17.7% better translation accuracy and 24.2% better rotation accuracy than ORB-SLAM3 on KITTI and 34.2% better translation accuracy on EuRoC. These results underscore the efficacy and robustness of our DK-SLAM in varied and challenging real-world environments.
ISSN:2076-3417