In recent years, unsupervised deep learning approaches have received significant attention to estimate the depth and visual odometry (VO) from unlabelled monocular image sequences. However, their performance is limited in challenging environments due to perceptual degradation, occlusions and rapid motions. Moreover, the existing unsupervised methods suffer from the lack of scale-consistency constraints across frames, which causes that the VO estimators fail to provide persistent trajectories over long sequences. In this study, we propose an unsupervised monocular deep VO framework that predicts six-degrees-of-freedom pose camera motion and depth map of the scene from unlabelled RGB image sequences. We provide detailed quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the proposed framework on a) a challenging dataset collected during the DARPA Subterranean challenge; and b) the benchmark KITTI and Cityscapes datasets. The proposed approach outperforms both traditional and state-of-the-art unsupervised deep VO methods providing better results for both pose estimation and depth recovery. The presented approach is part of the solution used by the COSTAR team participating at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.
We propose D3VO as a novel framework for monocular visual odometry that exploits deep networks on three levels -- deep depth, pose and uncertainty estimation. We first propose a novel self-supervised monocular depth estimation network trained on stereo videos without any external supervision. In particular, it aligns the training image pairs into similar lighting condition with predictive brightness transformation parameters. Besides, we model the photometric uncertainties of pixels on the input images, which improves the depth estimation accuracy and provides a learned weighting function for …
Monocular visual odometry approaches that purely rely on geometric cues are prone to scale drift and require sufficient motion parallax in successive frames for motion estimation and 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we propose to leverage deep monocular depth prediction to overcome limitations of geometry-based monocular visual odometry. To this end, we incorporate deep depth predictions into Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) as direct virtual stereo measurements. For depth prediction, we design a novel deep network that refines predicted depth from a single image in a two-stage process. We train …
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Northwest A&F University（西北农林科技大学）；CSIRO Data61（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Monocular visual odometry (VO) is an important task in robotics and computer vision. Thus far, how to build accurate and robust monocular VO systems that can work well in diverse scenarios remains largely unsolved. In this paper, we propose a framework to exploit monocular depth estimation for improving VO. The core of our framework is a monocular depth estimation module with a strong generalization capability for diverse scenes. It consists of two separate working modes to assist the localization and mapping. With a single monocular image input, the depth estimation module predicts a relative…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
Deep learning-based, single-view depth estimation methods have recently shown highly promising results. However, such methods ignore one of the most important features for determining depth in the human vision system, which is motion. We propose a learning-based, multi-view dense depth map and odometry estimation method that uses Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and trains utilizing multi-view image reprojection and forward-backward flow-consistency losses. Our model can be trained in a supervised or even unsupervised mode. It is designed for depth and visual odometry estimation from video wher…
Univrses AB（Univrses AB公司）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
Estimating depth from a single image represents an attractive alternative to more traditional approaches leveraging multiple cameras. In this field, deep learning yielded outstanding results at the cost of needing large amounts of data labeled with precise depth measurements for training. An issue softened by self-supervised approaches leveraging monocular sequences or stereo pairs in place of expensive ground truth depth annotations. This paper enables to further improve monocular depth estimation by integrating into existing self-supervised networks a geometrical prior. Specifically, we prop…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Indian Institute of Technology (BHU)（印度理工学院（贝拿勒斯印度教大学））
Despite learning based methods showing promising results in single view depth estimation and visual odometry, most existing approaches treat the tasks in a supervised manner. Recent approaches to single view depth estimation explore the possibility of learning without full supervision via minimizing photometric error. In this paper, we explore the use of stereo sequences for learning depth and visual odometry. The use of stereo sequences enables the use of both spatial (between left-right pairs) and temporal (forward backward) photometric warp error, and constrains the scene depth and camera m…
Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A)（阿拉贡工程研究所）；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）
We present a generic framework for scale-aware direct monocular odometry based on depth prediction from a deep neural network. In contrast with previous methods where depth information is only partially exploited, we formulate a novel depth prediction residual which allows us to incorporate multi-view depth information. In addition, we propose to use a truncated robust cost function which prevents considering inconsistent depth estimations. The photometric and depth-prediction measurements are integrated into a tightly-coupled optimization leading to a scale-aware monocular system which does n…
In this paper, we proposed a new deep learning based dense monocular SLAM method. Compared to existing methods, the proposed framework constructs a dense 3D model via a sparse to dense mapping using learned surface normals. With single view learned depth estimation as prior for monocular visual odometry, we obtain both accurate positioning and high quality depth reconstruction. The depth and normal are predicted by a single network trained in a tightly coupled manner.Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the performance of visual tracking and depth prediction in comp…
For ego-motion estimation, the feature representation of the scenes is crucial. Previous methods indicate that both the low-level and semantic feature-based methods can achieve promising results. Therefore, the incorporation of hierarchical feature representation may benefit from both methods. From this perspective, we propose a novel direct feature odometry framework, named DFO, for depth estimation and hierarchical feature representation learning from monocular videos. By exploiting the metric distance, our framework is able to learn the hierarchical feature representation without supervisio…
This paper presents an self-supervised deep learning network for monocular visual inertial odometry (named DeepVIO). DeepVIO provides absolute trajectory estimation by directly merging 2D optical flow feature (OFF) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. Specifically, it firstly estimates the depth and dense 3D point cloud of each scene by using stereo sequences, and then obtains 3D geometric constraints including 3D optical flow and 6-DoF pose as supervisory signals. Note that such 3D optical flow shows robustness and accuracy to dynamic objects and textureless environments. In DeepVIO trai…
School of Mechanical and Robotics Engineering, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)（光州科学技术学院机械与机器人工程学院）；Department of Smart ICT Convergence Engineering, Seoul National University of Science and Technology（首尔科学技术大学智能ICT融合工程系）
The University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Bogazici University（博阿齐奇大学）；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）
In the last decade, numerous supervised deep learning approaches requiring large amounts of labeled data have been proposed for visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and depth map estimation. To overcome the data limitation, self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising alternative, exploiting constraints such as geometric and photometric consistency in the scene. In this study, we introduce a novel self-supervised deep learning-based VIO and depth map recovery approach (SelfVIO) using adversarial training and self-adaptive visual-inertial sensor fusion. SelfVIO learns to jointly estimate 6 deg…
Megvii (Face++) Technology Inc.（旷视（Face++）科技有限公司）；School of Software & Microelectronics, Peking University（北京大学软件与微电子学院）
With monocular Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) system, 3D point cloud and camera motion can be estimated simultaneously. Because pure sparse 3D points provide a structureless representation of the environment, generating 3D mesh from sparse points can further model the environment topology and produce dense mapping. To improve the accuracy of 3D mesh generation and localization, we propose a tightly-coupled monocular VIO system, PLP-VIO, which exploits point features and line features as well as plane regularities. The co-planarity constraints are used to leverage additional structure informati…
Monocular visual odometry consists of the estimation of the position of an agent through images of a single camera, and it is applied in autonomous vehicles, medical robots, and augmented reality. However, monocular systems suffer from the scale ambiguity problem due to the lack of depth information in 2D frames. This paper contributes by showing an application of the dense prediction transformer model for scale estimation in monocular visual odometry systems. Experimental results show that the scale drift problem of monocular systems can be reduced through the accurate estimation of the depth…
Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Bogazici University（波加兹奇大学生物医学工程研究所）；Computer Science Department, University of Oxford（牛津大学计算机科学系）；Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院布莱根妇女医院）；Cancer Data Science, Dana Farber Cancer Institute（丹娜-法伯癌症研究所癌症数据科学部）；Cancer Program, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT（哈佛-麻省理工学院布罗德研究所癌症项目）；Institute for Systems and Robotics, University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学系统与机器人研究所）；Faculty of Medicine, Clinical Academic Center of Coimbra, University of Coimbra（科英布拉大学科英布拉临床学术中心医学院）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University（约翰霍普金斯大学生物医学工程系）
Deep learning techniques hold promise to develop dense topography reconstruction and pose estimation methods for endoscopic videos. However, currently available datasets do not support effective quantitative benchmarking. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive endoscopic SLAM dataset consisting of 3D point cloud data for six porcine organs, capsule and standard endoscopy recordings as well as synthetically generated data. A Panda robotic arm, two commercially available capsule endoscopes, two conventional endoscopes with different camera properties, and two high precision 3D scanners were…
An Online Adaptation Method for Robust Depth Estimation and Visual Odometry in the Open World
Brain-inspired Application Technology Center (BATC)（类脑应用技术中心）；School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学电子信息与电气工程学院）
Most learning-based methods estimate ego-motion by utilizing visual sensors, which suffer from dramatic lighting variations and textureless scenarios. In this paper, we incorporate sparse but accurate depth measurements obtained from lidars to overcome the limitation of visual methods. To this end, we design a self-supervised visual-lidar odometry (Self-VLO) framework. It takes both monocular images and sparse depth maps projected from 3D lidar points as input, and produces pose and depth estimations in an end-to-end learning manner, without using any ground truth labels. To effectively fuse t…
Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is the pose estimation backbone for most AR/VR and autonomous robotic systems today, in both academia and industry. However, these systems are highly sensitive to the initialization of key parameters such as sensor biases, gravity direction, and metric scale. In practical scenarios where high-parallax or variable acceleration assumptions are rarely met (e.g. hovering aerial robot, smartphone AR user not gesticulating with phone), classical visual-inertial initialization formulations often become ill-conditioned and/or fail to meaningfully converge. In this paper …
Acquiring accurate three-dimensional depth information conventionally requires expensive multibeam LiDAR devices. Recently, researchers have developed a less expensive option by predicting depth information from two-dimensional color imagery. However, there still exists a substantial gap in accuracy between depth information estimated from two-dimensional images and real LiDAR point-cloud. In this paper, we introduce a fusion-based depth prediction method, called FusionMapping. This is the first method that fuses colored imagery and two-dimensional laser scan to estimate depth in-formation. Mo…
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术学院）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电气工程与计算机科学学院）；School of Electrical Engineering（电气工程学院）；Computer Science Gwangju Institute of Science（光州科学技术学院计算机科学）
Depth estimation plays a important role in SLAM, odometry, and autonomous driving. Especially, monocular depth estimation is profitable technology because of its low cost, memory, and computation. However, it is not a sufficiently predicting depth map due to a camera often failing to get a clean image because of light conditions. To solve this problem, various sensor fusion method has been proposed. Even though it is a powerful method, sensor fusion requires expensive sensors, additional memory, and high computational performance. In this paper, we present color image and monochrome image pixe…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；American University of Beirut（贝鲁特美国大学）
Monocular Odometry systems can be broadly categorized as being either Direct, Indirect, or a hybrid of both. While Indirect systems process an alternative image representation to compute geometric residuals, Direct methods process the image pixels directly to generate photometric residuals. Both paradigms have distinct but often complementary properties. This paper presents a Unified Formulation for Visual Odometry, referred to as UFVO, with the following key contributions: (1) a tight coupling of photometric (Direct) and geometric (Indirect) measurements using a joint multi-objective optimiza…
Light-weight camera localization in existing maps is essential for vision-based navigation. Currently, visual and visual-inertial odometry (VO\&VIO) techniques are well-developed for state estimation but with inevitable accumulated drifts and pose jumps upon loop closure. To overcome these problems, we propose an efficient monocular camera localization method in prior LiDAR maps using direct 2D-3D line correspondences. To handle the appearance differences and modality gaps between LiDAR point clouds and images, geometric 3D lines are extracted offline from LiDAR maps while robust 2D lines are …
This paper proposes a novel approach for extending monocular visual odometry to a stereo camera system. The proposed method uses an additional camera to accurately estimate and optimize the scale of the monocular visual odometry, rather than triangulating 3D points from stereo matching. Specifically, the 3D points generated by the monocular visual odometry are projected onto the other camera of the stereo pair, and the scale is recovered and optimized by directly minimizing the photometric error. It is computationally efficient, adding minimal overhead to the stereo vision system compared to s…
We present a visual-inertial depth estimation pipeline that integrates monocular depth estimation and visual-inertial odometry to produce dense depth estimates with metric scale. Our approach performs global scale and shift alignment against sparse metric depth, followed by learning-based dense alignment. We evaluate on the TartanAir and VOID datasets, observing up to 30% reduction in inverse RMSE with dense scale alignment relative to performing just global alignment alone. Our approach is especially competitive at low density; with just 150 sparse metric depth points, our dense-to-dense dept…
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
We present a method for single image 3D cuboid object detection and multi-view object SLAM in both static and dynamic environments, and demonstrate that the two parts can improve each other. Firstly for single image object detection, we generate high-quality cuboid proposals from 2D bounding boxes and vanishing points sampling. The proposals are further scored and selected based on the alignment with image edges. Secondly, multi-view bundle adjustment with new object measurements is proposed to jointly optimize poses of cameras, objects and points. Objects can provide long-range geometric and …
National Tsing Hua University（台湾清华大学）；Phiar Technologies（Phiar科技公司）
We present 360-DFPE, a sequential floor plan estimation method that directly takes 360-images as input without relying on active sensors or 3D information. Our approach leverages a loosely coupled integration between a monocular visual SLAM solution and a monocular 360-room layout approach, which estimate camera poses and layout geometries, respectively. Since our task is to sequentially capture the floor plan using monocular images, the entire scene structure, room instances, and room shapes are unknown. To tackle these challenges, we first handle the scale difference between visual odometry …
School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学航空航天、机械与机电工程学院）；Sydney Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems（悉尼机器人与智能系统研究院）
While an exciting diversity of new imaging devices is emerging that could dramatically improve robotic perception, the challenges of calibrating and interpreting these cameras have limited their uptake in the robotics community. In this work we generalise techniques from unsupervised learning to allow a robot to autonomously interpret new kinds of cameras. We consider emerging sparse light field (LF) cameras, which capture a subset of the 4D LF function describing the set of light rays passing through a plane. We introduce a generalised encoding of sparse LFs that allows unsupervised learning …
Unsupervised Learning based monocular visual odometry (VO) has lately drawn significant attention for its potential in label-free leaning ability and robustness to camera parameters and environmental variations. However, partially due to the lack of drift correction technique, these methods are still by far less accurate than geometric approaches for large-scale odometry estimation. In this paper, we propose to leverage graph optimization and loop closure detection to overcome limitations of unsupervised learning based monocular visual odometry. To this end, we propose a hybrid VO system which…
Embedded Systems and Robotics, TCS Innovation Labs（嵌入式系统与机器人技术，塔塔咨询服务公司创新实验室）；Kolkata, India（印度加尔各答）
Most geometric approaches to monocular Visual Odometry (VO) provide robust pose estimates, but sparse or semi-dense depth estimates. Off late, deep methods have shown good performance in generating dense depths and VO from monocular images by optimizing the photometric consistency between images. Despite being intuitive, a naive photometric loss does not ensure proper pixel correspondences between two views, which is the key factor for accurate depth and relative pose estimations. It is a well known fact that simply minimizing such an error is prone to failures. We propose a method using Epipo…
National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）；Mobile Drive Technology（摩智科技）
A spatial AI that can perform complex tasks through visual signals and cooperate with humans is highly anticipated. To achieve this, we need a visual SLAM that easily adapts to new scenes without pre-training and generates dense maps for downstream tasks in real-time. None of the previous learning-based and non-learning-based visual SLAMs satisfy all needs due to the intrinsic limitations of their components. In this work, we develop a visual SLAM named Orbeez-SLAM, which successfully collaborates with implicit neural representation and visual odometry to achieve our goals. Moreover, Orbeez-SL…
Recent advances in deep learning for edge detection and segmentation opens up a new path for semantic-edge-based ego-motion estimation. In this work, we propose a robust monocular visual odometry (VO) framework using category-aware semantic edges. It can reconstruct large-scale semantic maps in challenging outdoor environments. The core of our approach is a semantic nearest neighbor field that facilitates a robust data association of edges across frames using semantics. This significantly enlarges the convergence radius during tracking phases. The proposed edge registration method can be easil…
University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
We propose a novel monocular visual odometry (VO) system called UnDeepVO in this paper. UnDeepVO is able to estimate the 6-DoF pose of a monocular camera and the depth of its view by using deep neural networks. There are two salient features of the proposed UnDeepVO: one is the unsupervised deep learning scheme, and the other is the absolute scale recovery. Specifically, we train UnDeepVO by using stereo image pairs to recover the scale but test it by using consecutive monocular images. Thus, UnDeepVO is a monocular system. The loss function defined for training the networks is based on spatia…
In this work we present WGANVO, a Deep Learning based monocular Visual Odometry method. In particular, a neural network is trained to regress a pose estimate from an image pair. The training is performed using a semi-supervised approach. Unlike geometry based monocular methods, the proposed method can recover the absolute scale of the scene without neither prior knowledge nor extra information. The evaluation of the system is carried out on the well-known KITTI dataset where it is shown to work in real time and the accuracy obtained is encouraging to continue the development of Deep Learning b…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
This paper proposes a new framework to solve the problem of monocular visual odometry, called MagicVO . Based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Bi-directional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), MagicVO outputs a 6-DoF absolute-scale pose at each position of the camera with a sequence of continuous monocular images as input. It not only utilizes the outstanding performance of CNN in image feature processing to extract the rich features of image frames fully but also learns the geometric relationship from image sequences pre and post through Bi-LSTM to get a more accurate prediction. A pipeline of the Magi…
Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；National Engineering Laboratory of Deep Learning Technology and Application（深度学习技术及应用国家工程实验室）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Australia Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）
Recovering the absolute metric scale from a monocular camera is a challenging but highly desirable problem for monocular camera-based systems. By using different kinds of cues, various approaches have been proposed for scale estimation, such as camera height, object size etc. In this paper, firstly, we summarize different kinds of scale estimation approaches. Then, we propose a robust divide and conquer the absolute scale estimation method based on the ground plane and camera height by analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. By using the estimated scale, an effectiv…
Most visual odometry algorithm for a monocular camera focuses on points, either by feature matching, or direct alignment of pixel intensity, while ignoring a common but important geometry entity: edges. In this paper, we propose an odometry algorithm that combines points and edges to benefit from the advantages of both direct and feature based methods. It works better in texture-less environments and is also more robust to lighting changes and fast motion by increasing the convergence basin. We maintain a depth map for the keyframe then in the tracking part, the camera pose is recovered by min…
We present a novel method for simultaneous learning of depth, egomotion, object motion, and camera intrinsics from monocular videos, using only consistency across neighboring video frames as supervision signal. Similarly to prior work, our method learns by applying differentiable warping to frames and comparing the result to adjacent ones, but it provides several improvements: We address occlusions geometrically and differentiably, directly using the depth maps as predicted during training. We introduce randomized layer normalization, a novel powerful regularizer, and we account for object mot…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies（马里兰大学高级计算机研究所）；SAAB, Inc.（萨博公司）；Army Research Laboratory（陆军研究实验室）
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Artisense GmbH
In this paper we propose a framework for integrating map-based relocalization into online direct visual odometry. To achieve map-based relocalization for direct methods, we integrate image features into Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) and rely on feature matching to associate online visual odometry (VO) with a previously built map. The integration of the relocalization poses is threefold. Firstly, they are incorporated as pose priors in the direct image alignment of the front-end tracking. Secondly, they are tightly integrated into the back-end bundle adjustment. Thirdly, an online fusion module …
University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；University of Lincoln（林肯大学）；Toshiba Research Europe（东芝欧洲研究院）
This paper introduces a fully deep learning approach to monocular SLAM, which can perform simultaneous localization using a neural network for learning visual odometry (L-VO) and dense 3D mapping. Dense 2D flow and a depth image are generated from monocular images by sub-networks, which are then used by a 3D flow associated layer in the L-VO network to generate dense 3D flow. Given this 3D flow, the dual-stream L-VO network can then predict the 6DOF relative pose and furthermore reconstruct the vehicle trajectory. In order to learn the correlation between motion directions, the Bivariate Gauss…
Oxford Robotics Institute（牛津机器人研究所）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
We present a self-supervised approach to ignoring "distractors" in camera images for the purposes of robustly estimating vehicle motion in cluttered urban environments. We leverage offline multi-session mapping approaches to automatically generate a per-pixel ephemerality mask and depth map for each input image, which we use to train a deep convolutional network. At run-time we use the predicted ephemerality and depth as an input to a monocular visual odometry (VO) pipeline, using either sparse features or dense photometric matching. Our approach yields metric-scale VO using only a single came…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
Deep Learning based techniques have been adopted with precision to solve a lot of standard computer vision problems, some of which are image classification, object detection and segmentation. Despite the widespread success of these approaches, they have not yet been exploited largely for solving the standard perception related problems encountered in autonomous navigation such as Visual Odometry (VO), Structure from Motion (SfM) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). This paper analyzes the problem of Monocular Visual Odometry using a Deep Learning-based framework, instead of the re…
This paper proposes a high-precision self-supervised monocular VO, which is specifically designed for navigation in foggy weather. A cycled generative adversarial network is designed to obtain high-quality self-supervised loss via forcing the forward and backward half-cycle to output consistent estimation. Moreover, gradient-based loss and perceptual loss are introduced to eliminate the interference of complex photometric change on self-supervised loss in foggy weather. To solve the ill-posed problem of depth estimation, a self-supervised multi-task learning aided depth estimation module is de…
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；American University of Beirut（贝鲁特美国大学）
Visual Odometry (VO) can be categorized as being either direct or feature based. When the system is calibrated photometrically, and images are captured at high rates, direct methods have shown to outperform feature-based ones in terms of accuracy and processing time; they are also more robust to failure in feature-deprived environments. On the downside, Direct methods rely on heuristic motion models to seed the estimation of camera motion between frames; in the event that these models are violated (e.g., erratic motion), Direct methods easily fail. This paper proposes a novel system entitled F…
Rolling Shutter (RS) cameras have become popularized because of low-cost imaging capability. However, the RS cameras suffer from undesirable artifacts when the camera or the subject is moving, or illumination condition changes. For that reason, Monocular Visual Odometry (MVO) with RS cameras produces inaccurate ego-motion estimates. Previous works solve this RS distortion problem with motion prediction from images and/or inertial sensors. However, the MVO still has trouble in handling the RS distortion when the camera motion changes abruptly (e.g. vibration of mobile cameras causes extremely f…
