g2o - General Graph Optimization

g2o is an open-source C++ framework for optimizing graph-based nonlinear error
functions. g2o has been designed to be easily extensible to a wide range of
problems and a new problem typically can be specified in a few lines of code.
The current implementation provides solutions to several variants of SLAM and
BA.

A wide range of problems in robotics as well as in computer-vision involve the
minimization of a non-linear error function that can be represented as a graph.
Typical instances are simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) or bundle
adjustment (BA). The overall goal in these problems is to find the
configuration of parameters or state variables that maximally explain a set of
measurements affected by Gaussian noise. g2o is an open-source C++ framework
for such nonlinear least squares problems. g2o has been designed to be easily
extensible to a wide range of problems and a new problem typically can be
specified in a few lines of code. The current implementation provides solutions
to several variants of SLAM and BA. g2o offers a performance comparable to
implementations of state-of-the-art approaches for the specific problems
(02/2011).

Papers Describing the Approach:
Rainer Kuemmerle, Giorgio Grisetti, Hauke Strasdat, Kurt Konolige, and Wolfram
Burgard: g2o: A General Framework for Graph Optimization, IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2011
http://ais.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/publications/papers/kuemmerle11icra.pdf

g2o is licensed under LGPL version 3, whereas the following parts are
licensed under GPL version 3:
- g2o_viewer
- g2o_incremental

See the doc folder for the full text of the licenses.

g2o is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
licenses for more details.


Requirements:
g2o requires cmake to build. The other requirements are optional.
  * cmake             http://www.cmake.org/
  * suitesparse       http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/sparse/SuiteSparse/
  * Qt4               http://qt.nokia.com/
  * libQGLViewer      http://www.libqglviewer.com/

  On Ubuntu / Debian these dependencies are resolved by installing the
  following packages.
    - cmake
    - libsuitesparse-dev
    - libqt4-dev
    - qt4-qmake
    - libqglviewer-qt4-dev


Compilation:
Our primary development platform is Linux. Experimental support for
Mac OS X and Windows (with MinGW as a compiler).
We recommend a so-called out of source build which can be achieved
by the following command sequence.

- mkdir build
- cd build
- cmake ../
- make

The binaries will be placed in bin and the libraries in lib which
are both located in the top-level folder.



Acknowledgments:
We thank Simon J. Julier for submitting patches to achieve compatibility
with Mac OS X and Michael A. Eriksen for submitting patches to compile
with MSVC.


Contact information:
Rainer Kuemmerle <kuemmerl@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
Giorgio Grisetti <grisetti@dis.uniroma1.it>
Hauke Strasdat <strasdat@gmail.com>
Kurt Konolige <konolige@willowgarage.com>
Wolfram Burgard <burgard@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>