MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry
State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems, Zhejiang University（浙江大学流体动力与机电系统国家重点实验室）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Industrial Big Data and Robot Intelligent Systems（浙江省工业大数据与机器人智能系统重点实验室）；School of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学机械工程学院）；Robotics Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学机器人研究院）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University（湖南大学人工智能与机器人学院）；Rural Health Research Institute, Charles Sturt University（查尔斯特大学农村健康研究所）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Monocular visual odometry (MVO) is foundational to autonomous navigation and robotic localization. However, existing learning-based MVO approaches often struggle with either a lack of interpretable, complementary features or overly complex multi-stage architectures. These limitations inherently restrict their robustness and cross-domain generalization. In this work, we propose MVOFormer, a novel transformer framework for robust monocular visual odometry. Our architecture features a Flow-Semantic Dual Branch Encoder that synergizes dense geometric motion cues with object-centric semantic priors, explicitly distinguishing static structures from dynamic distractors. These representations are then fused by an Iterative Multimodal Decoder, enabling coarse-to-fine pose refinement while dynamically suppressing attention on unreliable regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, without any target-domain fine-tuning, MVOFormer achieves superior zero-shot generalization and robustness, significantly outperforming prior learning-based frame-to-frame methods across diverse benchmarks including TartanAir, KITTI, TUM-RGBD, and ETH3D-SLAM.
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…
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…
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）
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…
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…
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…
In the context of robotic underwater operations, the visual degradations induced by the medium properties make difficult the exclusive use of cameras for localization purpose. Hence, most localization methods are based on expensive navigational sensors associated with acoustic positioning. On the other hand, visual odometry and visual SLAM have been exhaustively studied for aerial or terrestrial applications, but state-of-the-art algorithms fail underwater. In this paper we tackle the problem of using a simple low-cost camera for underwater localization and propose a new monocular visual odome…
University of Portsmouth（朴茨茅斯大学）；Plymouth University（普利茅斯大学）
We tackle the problem of localizing an autonomous sea-surface vehicle in river estuarine areas using monocular camera and angular velocity input from an inertial sensor. Our method is challenged by two prominent drawbacks associated with the environment, which are typically not present in standard visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) applications on land (or air): a) Scene depth varies significantly (from a few meters to several kilometers) and, b) In conjunction to the latter, there exists no ground plane to provide features with enough disparity based on which to reliably dete…
Ain Shams University（艾因夏姆斯大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
In this paper, an approach for reducing the drift in monocular visual odometry algorithms is proposed based on a feedforward neural network. A visual odometry algorithm computes the incremental motion of the vehicle between the successive camera frames, then integrates these increments to determine the pose of the vehicle. The proposed neural network reduces the errors in the pose estimation of the vehicle which results from the inaccuracies in features detection and matching, camera intrinsic parameters, and so on. These inaccuracies are propagated to the motion estimation of the vehicle caus…
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…
We propose a novel semi-direct approach for monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) that combines the complementary strengths of direct and feature-based methods. The proposed pipeline loosely couples direct odometry and feature-based SLAM to perform three levels of parallel optimizations: (1) photometric bundle adjustment (BA) that jointly optimizes the local structure and motion, (2) geometric BA that refines keyframe poses and associated feature map points, and (3) pose graph optimization to achieve global map consistency in the presence of loop closures. This is achieved in …
This paper proposes a novel approach to stereo visual odometry without stereo matching. It is particularly robust in scenes of repetitive high-frequency textures. Referred to as DSVO (Direct Stereo Visual Odometry), it operates directly on pixel intensities, without any explicit feature matching, and is thus efficient and more accurate than the state-of-the-art stereo-matching-based methods. It applies a semi-direct monocular visual odometry running on one camera of the stereo pair, tracking the camera pose and mapping the environment simultaneously; the other camera is used to optimize the sc…
Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
In this work, we propose a novel deep online correction (DOC) framework for monocular visual odometry. The whole pipeline has two stages: First, depth maps and initial poses are obtained from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained in self-supervised manners. Second, the poses predicted by CNNs are further improved by minimizing photometric errors via gradient updates of poses during inference phases. The benefits of our proposed method are twofold: 1) Different from online-learning methods, DOC does not need to calculate gradient propagation for parameters of CNNs. Thus, it saves more co…
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
In the future, extraterrestrial expeditions will not only be conducted by rovers but also by flying robots. The technical demonstration drone Ingenuity, that just landed on Mars, will mark the beginning of a new era of exploration unhindered by terrain traversability. Robust self-localization is crucial for that. Cameras that are lightweight, cheap and information-rich sensors are already used to estimate the ego-motion of vehicles. However, methods proven to work in man-made environments cannot simply be deployed on other planets. The highly repetitive textures present in the wastelands of Ma…
Monocular visual navigation methods have seen significant advances in the last decade, recently producing several real-time solutions for autonomously navigating small unmanned aircraft systems without relying on GPS. This is critical for military operations which may involve environments where GPS signals are degraded or denied. However, testing and comparing visual navigation algorithms remains a challenge since visual data is expensive to gather. Conducting flight tests in a virtual environment is an attractive solution prior to committing to outdoor testing. This work presents a virtual te…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Heriot Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）
Inspired by the cognitive process of humans and animals, Curriculum Learning (CL) trains a model by gradually increasing the difficulty of the training data. In this paper, we study whether CL can be applied to complex geometry problems like estimating monocular Visual Odometry (VO). Unlike existing CL approaches, we present a novel CL strategy for learning the geometry of monocular VO by gradually making the learning objective more difficult during training. To this end, we propose a novel geometry-aware objective function by jointly optimizing relative and composite transformations over smal…
Advanced Robotics and Automation (ARA) Laboratory（先进机器人与自动化实验室）；Computer Vision Laboratory (CVL)（计算机视觉实验室）；Evolutionary Computing Systems Lab, University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学里诺分校进化计算系统实验室）
Lidar-Monocular Visual Odometry (LIMO), a odometry estimation algorithm, combines camera and LIght Detection And Ranging sensor (LIDAR) for visual localization by tracking camera features as well as features from LIDAR measurements, and it estimates the motion using Bundle Adjustment based on robust key frames. For rejecting the outliers, LIMO uses semantic labelling and weights of the vegetation landmarks. A drawback of LIMO as well as many other odometry estimation algorithms is that it has many parameters that need to be manually adjusted according to the dynamic changes in the environment …
Interdisciplinary Center for Security Reliability and Trust (SnT)（安全、可靠性与信任跨学科中心（SnT））；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）
Unsupervised learning for monocular camera motion and 3D scene understanding has gained popularity over traditional methods, relying on epipolar geometry or non-linear optimization. Notably, deep learning can overcome many issues of monocular vision, such as perceptual aliasing, low-textured areas, scale-drift, and degenerate motions. Also, concerning supervised learning, we can fully leverage video streams data without the need for depth or motion labels. However, in this work, we note that rotational motion can limit the accuracy of the unsupervised pose networks more than the translational …
This paper introduces the united monocular-stereo features into a visual-inertial tightly coupled odometry (UMS-VINS) for robust pose estimation. UMS-VINS requires two cameras and a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU). The UMS-VINS is an evolution of VINS-FUSION, which modifies the VINS-FUSION from the following three perspectives. 1) UMS-VINS extracts and tracks features from the sub-pixel plane to achieve better positions of the features. 2) UMS-VINS introduces additional 2-dimensional features from the left and/or right cameras. 3) If the visual initialization fails, the IMU propagatio…
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…
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…
In this work, we propose a monocular visual odometry framework, which allows exploiting the best attributes of edge feature for illumination-robust camera tracking, while at the same time ameliorating the performance degradation of edge mapping. In the front-end, an ICP-based edge registration can provide robust motion estimation and coarse data association under lighting changes. In the back-end, a novel edge-guided data association pipeline searches for the best photometrically matched points along geometrically possible edges through template matching, so that the matches can be further ref…
This paper studies monocular visual odometry (VO) problem. Most of existing VO algorithms are developed under a standard pipeline including feature extraction, feature matching, motion estimation, local optimisation, etc. Although some of them have demonstrated superior performance, they usually need to be carefully designed and specifically fine-tuned to work well in different environments. Some prior knowledge is also required to recover an absolute scale for monocular VO. This paper presents a novel end-to-end framework for monocular VO by using deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks …
Higher level functionality in autonomous driving depends strongly on a precise motion estimate of the vehicle. Powerful algorithms have been developed. However, their great majority focuses on either binocular imagery or pure LIDAR measurements. The promising combination of camera and LIDAR for visual localization has mostly been unattended. In this work we fill this gap, by proposing a depth extraction algorithm from LIDAR measurements for camera feature tracks and estimating motion by robustified keyframe based Bundle Adjustment. Semantic labeling is used for outlier rejection and weighting …
Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A)（阿拉贡工程研究所 (I3A)）；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）
In recent years there have been excellent results in Visual-Inertial Odometry techniques, which aim to compute the incremental motion of the sensor with high accuracy and robustness. However these approaches lack the capability to close loops, and trajectory estimation accumulates drift even if the sensor is continually revisiting the same place. In this work we present a novel tightly-coupled Visual-Inertial Simultaneous Localization and Mapping system that is able to close loops and reuse its map to achieve zero-drift localization in already mapped areas. While our approach can be applied to…
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）
To achieve robust and accurate state estimation for robot navigation, we propose a novel Visual Inertial Odometry(VIO) algorithm with line features upon the theory of invariant Kalman filtering and Cubature Kalman Filter (CKF). In contrast with conventional CKF, the state of the filter is constructed by a high dimensional Matrix Lie group and the uncertainty is represented using Lie algebra. To improve the robustness of system in challenging scenes, e.g. low-texture or illumination changing environments, line features are brought into the state variable. In the proposed algorithm, exponential …
Peking University（北京大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Beijing Changcheng Aviation Measurement and Control Institute（北京长城航空测控技术研究所）
We present a novel end-to-end visual odometry architecture with guided feature selection based on deep convolutional recurrent neural networks. Different from current monocular visual odometry methods, our approach is established on the intuition that features contribute discriminately to different motion patterns. Specifically, we propose a dual-branch recurrent network to learn the rotation and translation separately by leveraging current Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for feature representation and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for image sequence reasoning. To enhance the ability of fe…
In this paper, we present a multi-camera visual odometry (VO) system for an autonomous vehicle. Our system mainly consists of a virtual LiDAR and a pose tracker. We use a perspective transformation method to synthesize a surround-view image from undistorted fisheye camera images. With a semantic segmentation model, the free space can be extracted. The scans of the virtual LiDAR are generated by discretizing the contours of the free space. As for the pose tracker, we propose a visual odometry system fusing both the feature matching and the virtual LiDAR scan matching results. Only those feature…
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 …
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 …
Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A), Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学阿拉贡工程研究所（I3A））；Oculus Research
We present ORB-SLAM2 a complete SLAM system for monocular, stereo and RGB-D cameras, including map reuse, loop closing and relocalization capabilities. The system works in real-time on standard CPUs in a wide variety of environments from small hand-held indoors sequences, to drones flying in industrial environments and cars driving around a city. Our back-end based on bundle adjustment with monocular and stereo observations allows for accurate trajectory estimation with metric scale. Our system includes a lightweight localization mode that leverages visual odometry tracks for unmapped regions …
University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies（多伦多大学航空航天研究所）
We present a self-supervised deep pose correction (DPC) network that applies pose corrections to a visual odometry estimator to improve its accuracy. Instead of regressing inter-frame pose changes directly, we build on prior work that uses data-driven learning to regress pose corrections that account for systematic errors due to violations of modelling assumptions. Our self-supervised formulation removes any requirement for six-degrees-of-freedom ground truth and, in contrast to expectations, often improves overall navigation accuracy compared to a supervised approach. Through extensive experi…
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…
International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所）；Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms (MILA)（蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）；Universite de Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）
With the success of deep learning based approaches in tackling challenging problems in computer vision, a wide range of deep architectures have recently been proposed for the task of visual odometry (VO) estimation. Most of these proposed solutions rely on supervision, which requires the acquisition of precise ground-truth camera pose information, collected using expensive motion capture systems or high-precision IMU/GPS sensor rigs. In this work, we propose an unsupervised paradigm for deep visual odometry learning. We show that using a noisy teacher, which could be a standard VO pipeline, an…
In this work, we propose a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system using a monocular camera and Ultra-wideband (UWB) sensors. Our system, referred to as VRSLAM, is a multi-stage framework that leverages the strengths and compensates for the weaknesses of each sensor. Firstly, we introduce a UWB-aided 7 degree-of-freedom (scale factor, 3D position, and 3D orientation) global alignment module to initialize the visual odometry (VO) system in the world frame defined by the UWB anchors. This module loosely fuses up-to-scale VO and ranging data using either a quadratically constrained qu…
Sorbonne Universités, université de technologie de Compiègne, CNRS, UMR 7253 Heudiasyc（索邦大学，贡比涅技术大学，法国国家科学研究中心，Heudiasyc实验室）
In monocular vision systems, lack of knowledge about metric distances caused by the inherent scale ambiguity can be a strong limitation for some applications. We offer a method for fusing inertial measurements with monocular odometry or tracking to estimate metric distances in inertial-monocular systems and to increase the rate of pose estimates. As we performed the fusion in a loosely-coupled manner, each input block can be easily replaced with one's preference, which makes our method quite flexible. We experimented our method using the ORB-SLAM algorithm for the monocular tracking input and …
