Visual Odometry Estimation Research Articles

Stereo Visual-Inertial Odometry With Multiple Kalman Filters Ensemble

In this paper, we present a stereo visual-inertial odometry algorithm assembled with three separated Kalman filters, i.e., attitude filter, orientation filter, and position filter. Our algorithm carries out the orientation and position estimation with three filters working on different fusion intervals, which can provide more robustness even when the visual odometry estimation fails. In our orientation estimation, we propose an improved indirect Kalman filter, which uses the orientation error space represented by unit quaternion as the state of the filter. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated through extensive experimental results, including the benchmark KITTI datasets and some challenging datasets captured in a rough terrain campus.

Filtering Based Adaptive Visual Odometry Sensor Framework Robust to Blurred Images.

Visual odometry (VO) estimation from blurred image is a challenging problem in practical robot applications, and the blurred images will severely reduce the estimation accuracy of the VO. In this paper, we address the problem of visual odometry estimation from blurred images, and present an adaptive visual odometry estimation framework robust to blurred images. Our approach employs an objective measure of images, named small image gradient distribution (SIGD), to evaluate the blurring degree of the image, then an adaptive blurred image classification algorithm is proposed to recognize the blurred images, finally we propose an anti-blurred key-frame selection algorithm to enable the VO robust to blurred images. We also carried out varied comparable experiments to evaluate the performance of the VO algorithms with our anti-blur framework under varied blurred images, and the experimental results show that our approach can achieve superior performance comparing to the state-of-the-art methods under the condition with blurred images while not increasing too much computation cost to the original VO algorithms.

Fast Visual Odometry Using Intensity-Assisted Iterative Closest Point

This letter presents a novel method for visual odometry estimation from a RGB-D camera. The camera motion is estimated by aligning a source to a target RGB-D frame using an intensity-assisted iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. The proposed method differs from the conventional ICP in following aspects. 1) To reduce the computational cost, salient point selection is performed on the source frame, where only points that contain valuable information for registration are used. 2) To reduce the influence of outliers and noises, robust weighting function is proposed to weight corresponding pairs based on statistics of their spatial distances and intensity differences. 3) The obtained robust weighting function from 2) is used for correspondence estimation of the following ICP iteration. The proposed method runs in real-time with a single core CPU thread, hence it is suitable for robots with limited computation resources. The evaluation on TUM RGB-D benchmark shows that in the majority of the tested sequences, our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art accuracy in terms of translational drift per second with a computation speed of 78 Hz.

3차원 장면 복원을 위한 강건한 실시간 시각 주행 거리 측정

본 논문에서는 RGB-D 입력 영상들로부터 3차원 공간을 움직이는 카메라의 실시간 포즈를 효과적으로 추적할 수 있는 시각 주행 거리측정기를 제안한다. 본 논문에서 제안하는 시각 주행 거리 측정기에서는 컬러 영상과 깊이 영상의 풍부한 정보를 충분히 활용하면서도 실시간 계산량을 줄이기 위해, 특징 기반의 저밀도 주행 거리 계산 방법을 사용한다. 본 시스템에서는 보다 정확한 주행 거리 추정치를 얻기 위해, 카메라 이동 이전과 이동 이후의 영상에서 추출한 특징들을 정합한 뒤, 정합된 특징들에 대한 추가적인 정상 집합 정제 과정과 주행 거리 정제 작업을 반복한다. 또한, 정제 후 잔여 정상 집합의 크기가 충분치 않은 경우에도 잔여 정상 집합의 크기에 비례해 최종 주행 거리를 결정함으로써, 추적 성공률을 크게 향상시켰다. TUM 대학의 벤치마크 데이터 집합을 이용한 실험과 3차원 장면 복원 응용 시스템의 구현을 통해, 본 논문에서 제안하는 시각 주행 거리 측정 방법의 높은 성능을 확인할 수 있었다. In this paper, we present an effective visual odometry estimation system to track the real-time pose of a camera moving in 3D space. In order to meet the real-time requirement as well as to make full use of rich information from color and depth images, our system adopts a feature-based sparse odometry estimation method. After matching features extracted from across image frames, it repeats both the additional inlier set refinement and the motion refinement to get more accurate estimate of camera odometry. Moreover, even when the remaining inlier set is not sufficient, our system computes the final odometry estimate in proportion to the size of the inlier set, which improves the tracking success rate greatly. Through experiments with TUM benchmark datasets and implementation of the 3D scene reconstruction application, we confirmed the high performance of the proposed visual odometry estimation method.

Robust visual odometry estimation of road vehicle from dominant surfaces for large‐scale mapping

Every urban environment contains a rich set of dominant surfaces which can provide a solid foundation for visual odometry estimation. In this work visual odometry is robustly estimated by computing the motion of camera mounted on a vehicle. The proposed method first identifies a planar region and dynamically estimates the plane parameters. The candidate region and estimated plane parameters are then tracked in the subsequent images and an incremental update of the visual odometry is obtained. The proposed method is evaluated on a navigation dataset of stereo images taken by a car mounted camera that is driven in a large urban environment. The consistency and resilience of the method has also been evaluated on an indoor robot dataset. The results suggest that the proposed visual odometry estimation can robustly recover the motion by tracking a dominant planar surface in the Manhattan environment. In addition to motion estimation solution a set of strategies are discussed for mitigating the problematic factors arising from the unpredictable nature of the environment. The analyses of the results as well as dynamic environmental strategies indicate a strong potential of the method for being part of an autonomous or semi-autonomous system.

Pose Interpolation for Laser‐based Visual Odometry

In this paper, we present two methods for obtaining visual odometry (VO) estimates using a scanning laser rangefinder. Although common VO implementations utilize stereo camera imagery, passive cameras are dependent on ambient light. In contrast, actively illuminated sensors such as laser rangefinders work in a variety of lighting conditions, including full darkness. We leverage previous successes by applying sparse appearance‐based methods to laser intensity images, and we address the issue of motion distortion by considering the timestamps of the interest points detected in each image. To account for the unique timestamps, we introduce two estimator formulations. In the first method, we extend the conventional discrete‐time batch estimation formulation by introducing a novel frame‐to‐frame linear interpolation scheme, and in the second method, we consider the estimation problem by starting with a continuous‐time process model. This is facilitated by Gaussian process Gauss‐Newton (GPGN), an algorithm for nonparametric, continuous‐time, nonlinear, batch state estimation. Both laser‐based VO methods are compared and validated using datasets obtained by two experimental configurations. These datasets consist of 11 km of field data gathered by a high‐frame‐rate scanning lidar and a 365 m traverse using a sweeping planar laser rangefinder. Statistical analysis shows a 5.3% average translation error as a percentage of distance traveled for linear interpolation and 4.4% for GPGN in the high‐frame‐rate scenario.

Real-time Visual Odometry Estimation Based on Principal Direction Detection on Ceiling Vision

In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for odometry estimation based on ceiling vision. The main contribution of this algorithm is the introduction of principal direction detection that can greatly reduce error accumulation problem in most visual odometry estimation approaches. The principal direction is defined based on the fact that our ceiling is filled with artificial vertical and horizontal lines which can be used as reference for the current robot's heading direction. The proposed approach can be operated in real-time and it performs well even with camera's disturbance. A moving low-cost RGB-D camera (Kinect), mounted on a robot, is used to continuously acquire point clouds. Iterative closest point (ICP) is the common way to estimate the current camera position by registering the currently captured point cloud to the previous one. However, its performance suffers from data association problem or it requires pre-alignment information. The performance of the proposed principal direction detection approach does not rely on data association knowledge. Using this method, two point clouds are properly pre-aligned. Hence, we can use ICP to fine-tune the transformation parameters and minimize registration error. Experimental results demonstrate the performance and stability of the proposed system under disturbance in real-time. Several indoor tests are carried out to show that the proposed visual odometry estimation method can help to significantly improve the accuracy of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

OpenRatSLAM: an open source brain-based SLAM system

RatSLAM is a navigation system based on the neural processes underlying navigation in the rodent brain, capable of operating with low resolution monocular image data. Seminal experiments using RatSLAM include mapping an entire suburb with a web camera and a long term robot delivery trial. This paper describes OpenRatSLAM, an open-source version of RatSLAM with bindings to the Robot Operating System framework to leverage advantages such as robot and sensor abstraction, networking, data playback, and visualization. OpenRatSLAM comprises connected ROS nodes to represent RatSLAM's pose cells, experience map, and local view cells, as well as a fourth node that provides visual odometry estimates. The nodes are described with reference to the RatSLAM model and salient details of the ROS implementation such as topics, messages, parameters, class diagrams, sequence diagrams, and parameter tuning strategies. The performance of the system is demonstrated on three publicly available open-source datasets.

Accurate Global Localization Using Visual Odometry and Digital Maps on Urban Environments

Over the past few years, advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs) have become a key element in the research and development of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) and particularly of intelligent vehicles. Many of these systems require accurate global localization information, which has been traditionally performed by the Global Positioning System (GPS), despite its well-known failings, particularly in urban environments. Different solutions have been attempted to bridge the gaps of GPS positioning errors, but they usually require additional expensive sensors. Vision-based algorithms have proved to be capable of tracking the position of a vehicle over long distances using only a sequence of images as input and with no prior knowledge of the environment. This paper describes a full solution to the estimation of the global position of a vehicle in a digital road map by means of visual information alone. Our solution is based on a stereo platform used to estimate the motion trajectory of the ego vehicle and a map-matching algorithm, which will correct the cumulative errors of the vision-based motion information and estimate the global position of the vehicle in a digital road map. We demonstrate our system in large-scale urban experiments reaching high accuracy in the estimation of the global position and allowing for longer GPS blackouts due to both the high accuracy of our visual odometry estimation and the correction of the cumulative error of the map-matching algorithm. Typically, challenging situations in urban environments such as nonstatic objects or illumination exceeding the dynamic range of the cameras are shown and discussed.

Long‐range rover localization by matching LIDAR scans to orbital elevation maps

AbstractCurrent rover localization techniques such as visual odometry have proven to be very effective on short‐ to medium‐length traverses (e.g., up to a few kilometers). This paper deals with the problem of long‐range rover localization (e.g., 10 km and up) by developing an algorithm named MOGA (Multi‐frame Odometry‐compensated Global Alignment). This algorithm is designed to globally localize a rover by matching features detected from a three‐dimensional (3D) orbital elevation map to features from rover‐based, 3D LIDAR scans. The accuracy and efficiency of MOGA are enhanced with visual odometry and inclinometer/sun‐sensor orientation measurements. The methodology was tested with real data, including 37 LIDAR scans of terrain from a Mars–Moon analog site on Devon Island, Nunavut. When a scan contained a sufficient number of good topographic features, localization produced position errors of no more than 100 m, of which most were less than 50 m and some even as low as a few meters. Results were compared to and shown to outperform VIPER, a competing global localization algorithm that was given the same initial conditions as MOGA. On a 10‐km traverse, MOGA's localization estimates were shown to significantly outperform visual odometry estimates. This paper shows how the developed algorithm can be used to accurately and autonomously localize a rover over long‐range traverses. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.