Improving Dynamic Visual SLAM in Robotic Environments via Angle-Based Optical Flow Analysis


DİKİCİ S., ARI F.

Electronics (Switzerland), cilt.15, sa.1, 2026 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 15 Sayı: 1
  • Basım Tarihi: 2026
  • Doi Numarası: 10.3390/electronics15010223
  • Dergi Adı: Electronics (Switzerland)
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Compendex, INSPEC
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: dynamic simultaneous localization and mapping, feature point filtering, monocular vision, motion direction estimation, optical flow-based motion analysis, real-time robotic localization, visual simultaneous localization and mapping
  • Ankara Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Dynamic objects present a major challenge for visual simultaneous localization and mapping (Visual SLAM), as feature measurements originating from moving regions can corrupt camera pose estimation and lead to inaccurate maps. In this paper, we propose a lightweight, semantic-free front-end enhancement for ORB-SLAM that detects and suppresses dynamic features using optical flow geometry. The key idea is to estimate a global motion direction point (MDP) from optical flow vectors and to classify feature points based on their angular consistency with the camera-induced motion field. Unlike magnitude-based flow filtering, the proposed strategy exploits the geometric consistency of optical flow with respect to a motion direction point, providing robustness not only to depth variation and camera speed changes but also to different camera motion patterns, including pure translation and pure rotation. The method is integrated into the ORB-SLAM front-end without modifying the back-end optimization or cost function. Experiments on public dynamic-scene datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces absolute trajectory error by up to approximately 45% compared to baseline ORB-SLAM, while maintaining real-time performance on a CPU-only platform. These results indicate that reliable dynamic feature suppression can be achieved without semantic priors or deep learning models.