Scaled Monocular Visual SLAM

Abstract

The fundamental shortcoming underlying monocular-based localization
and mapping solutions (SfM, Visual SLAM) is the fact that
the obtained maps and motion are solved up to an unknown scale.
Yet, the literature provides interesting solutions to scale estimation
using cues from focus or defocus of a camera. In this paper, we
take advantage of the scale offered by image focus to properly initialize
Visual SLAM with a correct metric scale. We provide experiments
showing the success of the proposed method and discuss
its limitations.