Real-time pose estimation with RGB-D camera

An RGB-D camera is a sensor which outputs the distances to objects in a scene in addition to their RGB color. Recent technological advances in this area have introduced affordable devices in the robotics community. In this paper, we present a real-time feature extraction and pose estimation technique using the data from a single RGB-D camera. First, a set of edge features are computed from the depth and color images. The down-sampled point clouds consisting of the feature points are aligned using the Iterative Closest Point algorithm in 3D space. New features are aligned against a model consisting of previous features from a limited number of past scans. The system achieves a 10 Hz update rate running on a desktop CPU, using VGA resolution RGB-D scans.