%0 Conference Proceedings %F Meilland12a %A Meilland, M. %A Rives, P. %A I. Comport, A. %T Dense RGB-D mapping of large scale environments for real-time localisation and autonomous navigation %B Intelligent Vehicle (IV'12) Workshop on Navigation, Perception, Accurate Positioning and Mapping for Intelligent Vehicles %C Alcala de Henares, Spain %X This paper presents a method and apparatus for building 3D dense visual maps of large scale environments for real-time localisation and autonomous navigation. We propose a spherical ego-centric representation of the environment which is able to reproduce photo-realistic omnidirectional views of captured environments. This representation is composed of a graph of locally accurate augmented spherical panoramas that allows to generate varying viewpoints through novel view synthesis. The spheres are related by a graph of 6 d.o.f. poses which are estimated through multi-view spherical registration. It is shown that this representation can be used to accurately localise a vehicle navigating within the spherical graph, using only a monocular camera for accurate localisation. To perform this task, an efficient direct image registration technique is employed. This approach directly exploits the advantages of the spherical representation by minimising a photometric error between a current image and a reference sphere. Autonomous navigation results are shown in challenging urban environ- ments, containing pedestrians and other vehicles %U http://www.irisa.fr/lagadic/pdf/2012_iv_meilland.pdf %8 June %D 2012