학술논문

Salient Sparse Visual Odometry With Pose-Only Supervision
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 9(5):4774-4781 May, 2024
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Optical flow
Estimation
Training
Robustness
Feature extraction
Image motion analysis
Optical variables control
Deep learning
optical flow
visual odometry
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
Visual Odometry (VO) is vital for the navigation of autonomous systems, providing accurate position and orientation estimates at reasonable costs. While traditional VO methods excel in some conditions, they struggle with challenges like variable lighting and motion blur. Deep learning-based VO, though more adaptable, can face generalization problems in new environments. Addressing these drawbacks, this letter presents a novel hybrid visual odometry (VO) framework that leverages pose-only supervision, offering a balanced solution between robustness and the need for extensive labeling. We propose two cost-effective and innovative designs: a self-supervised homographic pre-training for enhancing optical flow learning from pose-only labels and a random patch-based salient point detection strategy for more accurate optical flow patch extraction. These designs eliminate the need for dense optical flow labels for training and significantly improve the generalization capability of the system in diverse and challenging environments. Our pose-only supervised method achieves competitive performance on standard datasets and greater robustness and generalization ability in extreme and unseen scenarios, even compared to dense optical flow-supervised state-of-the-art methods.