Robustness Improvement of Using Pre-Trained Network in Visual Odometry for On-Road Driving

Abstract

Robustness in on-road driving Visual Odometry (VO) systems is critical, as it determines the reliable performance in various scenarios and environments. Especially with the development of data-driven technology, the combination of data-driven VO and model-based VO has achieved accurate tracking performance. However, the lack of generalization of pre-trained deep neural networks (DNN) limits the robustness of such a combination in unseen environments. In this study, we introduce a novel framework with appropriate usage of DNN prediction and improve the robustness in the self-driving application. Based on the characteristic of on-road self-driving motion and the DNN output, we propose a two-step optimization strategy with a variable degree of freedom (DoF), i.e., the use of two types of DoF representations during pose estimation. Specifically, our two-step optimization operates according to the residual of the optimization with the motion label classification from the pre-trained DNN, as well as our proposed Motion Evaluation by essential matrix construction. Experimental results show that our framework obtains better tracking accuracy than the existing methods.