TANDEM: Tracking and Dense Mapping in Real-time using Deep Multi-view Stereo
This addresses the problem of robust and efficient 3D scene understanding for robotics or AR/VR applications, representing an incremental improvement with novel components.
The paper tackles real-time monocular tracking and dense mapping by introducing TANDEM, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods in camera tracking and achieves real-time 3D reconstruction.
In this paper, we present TANDEM a real-time monocular tracking and dense mapping framework. For pose estimation, TANDEM performs photometric bundle adjustment based on a sliding window of keyframes. To increase the robustness, we propose a novel tracking front-end that performs dense direct image alignment using depth maps rendered from a global model that is built incrementally from dense depth predictions. To predict the dense depth maps, we propose Cascade View-Aggregation MVSNet (CVA-MVSNet) that utilizes the entire active keyframe window by hierarchically constructing 3D cost volumes with adaptive view aggregation to balance the different stereo baselines between the keyframes. Finally, the predicted depth maps are fused into a consistent global map represented as a truncated signed distance function (TSDF) voxel grid. Our experimental results show that TANDEM outperforms other state-of-the-art traditional and learning-based monocular visual odometry (VO) methods in terms of camera tracking. Moreover, TANDEM shows state-of-the-art real-time 3D reconstruction performance.