  Real-time dense computer vision and SLAM offer great potential for a new
level of scene modelling, tracking and real environmental interaction for many
types of robot, but their high computational requirements mean that use on mass
market embedded platforms is challenging. Meanwhile, trends in low-cost,
low-power processing are towards massive parallelism and heterogeneity, making
it difficult for robotics and vision researchers to implement their algorithms
in a performance-portable way. In this paper we introduce SLAMBench, a
publicly-available software framework which represents a starting point for
quantitative, comparable and validatable experimental research to investigate
trade-offs in performance, accuracy and energy consumption of a dense RGB-D
SLAM system. SLAMBench provides a KinectFusion implementation in C++, OpenMP,
OpenCL and CUDA, and harnesses the ICL-NUIM dataset of synthetic RGB-D
sequences with trajectory and scene ground truth for reliable accuracy
comparison of different implementation and algorithms. We present an analysis
and breakdown of the constituent algorithmic elements of KinectFusion, and
experimentally investigate their execution time on a variety of multicore and
GPUaccelerated platforms. For a popular embedded platform, we also present an
analysis of energy efficiency for different configuration alternatives.
