RS-SLAM: real time semantic slam with driverless car using LiDAR-camera-IMU sensing

Abstract Accurate and robust Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology is a critical component of driverless cars, and semantic information plays a vital role in their analysis and understanding of the scene. In the actual scene, the moving object will produce the shadow phenomenon in the mapping process. The positioning accuracy and mapping effect will be affected. Therefore, we propose a semantic SLAM framework combining LiDAR, IMU, and camera, which includes a semantic fusion front-end odometry module and a closed-loop back-end optimization module based on semantic information. An improved image semantic segmentation algorithm based on Deeplabv3+ is designed to enhance the performance of the image semantic segmentation model by replacing the backbone network and introducing an attention mechanism to ensure the accuracy of point cloud segmentation. Dynamic objects are detected and eliminated by calculating the similarity score of semantic labels. A loop closure detection method based on semantic information is proposed to detect key semantic features and use threshold range detection and point cloud re-matching to establish the correct loop closure detection, and finally reduce the global cumulative error and improve the global trajectory accuracy using graph optimization to ultimately obtain the global motion trajectory and realize the construction of 3D semantic maps. We evaluated it on the KITTI dataset and collected a dataset for evaluation by ourselves, which includes four different sequences. The results show that the proposed framework has good positioning accuracy and mapping effect in large-scale urban road environments.