  The research in dense online 3D mapping is mostly focused on the geometrical
accuracy and spatial extent of the reconstructions. Their color appearance is
often neglected, leading to inconsistent colors and noticeable artifacts. We
rectify this by extending a state-of-the-art SLAM system to accumulate colors
in HDR space. We replace the simplistic pixel intensity averaging scheme with
HDR color fusion rules tailored to the incremental nature of SLAM and a noise
model suitable for off-the-shelf RGB-D cameras. Our main contribution is a
map-aware exposure time controller. It makes decisions based on the global
state of the map and predicted camera motion, attempting to maximize the
information gain of each observation. We report a set of experiments
demonstrating the improved texture quality and advantages of using the custom
controller that is tightly integrated in the mapping loop.
