  We propose a novel semi-direct approach for monocular simultaneous
localization and mapping (SLAM) that combines the complementary strengths of
direct and feature-based methods. The proposed pipeline loosely couples direct
odometry and feature-based SLAM to perform three levels of parallel
optimizations: (1) photometric bundle adjustment (BA) that jointly optimizes
the local structure and motion, (2) geometric BA that refines keyframe poses
and associated feature map points, and (3) pose graph optimization to achieve
global map consistency in the presence of loop closures. This is achieved in
real-time by limiting the feature-based operations to marginalized keyframes
from the direct odometry module. Exhaustive evaluation on two benchmark
datasets demonstrates that our system outperforms the state-of-the-art
monocular odometry and SLAM systems in terms of overall accuracy and
robustness.
