Evaluating the Impact of Semantic Segmentation and Pose Estimation on Dense Semantic SLAM
This work identifies key bottlenecks for researchers and practitioners in robotics and computer vision, but it is incremental as it focuses on evaluation rather than proposing new methods.
The paper tackled the problem of evaluating error sources in dense semantic SLAM, finding that semantic segmentation is the largest contributor, reducing mAP by up to 74.3% and OMQ by up to 71.3%.
Recent Semantic SLAM methods combine classical geometry-based estimation with deep learning-based object detection or semantic segmentation. In this paper we evaluate the quality of semantic maps generated by state-of-the-art class- and instance-aware dense semantic SLAM algorithms whose codes are publicly available and explore the impacts both semantic segmentation and pose estimation have on the quality of semantic maps. We obtain these results by providing algorithms with ground-truth pose and/or semantic segmentation data available from simulated environments. We establish that semantic segmentation is the largest source of error through our experiments, dropping mAP and OMQ performance by up to 74.3% and 71.3% respectively.