Indoor localization and 3D scene reconstruction for mobile robots using the Microsoft Kinect sensor

In this paper we present an approach to indoor localization and 3D scene reconstruction using the Microsoft Kinect sensor. The proposed system can simultaneously estimates the position and orientation of a hand-held Kinect and generates a dense 3D model of the indoor environment. Furthermore, the robustness and processing time for four different feature descriptors (SURF, ORB, Shi-Tomasi and FAST) are evaluated. The experiment results demonstrate that our system can robustly deal with complicated data in common indoor scenarios while running in semi-real-time.