HVL-SLAM: Hybrid Vision and LiDAR Fusion for SLAM

In the field of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), map-based localization has been widely used in autonomous driving, particularly for all-speed and all-road adaptive cruise, automatic parking, and other high-level functions. As a result, LiDAR sensors are frequently used in visual-based SLAM to improve the overall accuracy of ego-motion estimation and environment reconstruction. In this article, a novel tightly coupled monocular hybrid visual LiDAR SLAM (HVL-SLAM), which utilizes both visual and LiDAR measurements in tracking and mapping. First, the proposed method reduces the 3-D uncertainty of features by employing object segmentation and Delaunay triangulation. The motion between adjacent frames is then estimated using a hybrid tracking module that minimizes photometric and reprojection error. Finally, a joint optimization method for refining the pose is proposed, which incorporates visual and LiDAR measurements into optimization with dynamic weights, resulting in higher positioning accuracy and robustness. The experiments on the public KITTI odometry benchmark and real-world outdoor datasets demonstrate that HVL-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of pose estimation and mapping performance. The code is released to the community. Code available at https://github.com/kinggreat24/hvl_slam.