Visual SLAM with an Omnidirectional Camera

In this work we integrate the Spherical Camera Model for catadioptric systems in a Visual-SLAM application. The Spherical Camera Model is a projection model that unifies central catadioptric and conventional cameras. To integrate this model into the Extended Kalman Filter-based SLAM we require to linearize the direct and the inverse projection. We have performed an initial experimentation with omni directional and conventional real sequences including challenging trajectories. The results confirm that the omni directional camera gives much better orientation accuracy improving the estimated camera trajectory.