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Real Time Direct Visual Odometry for Flexible Multi-camera Rigs

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 10114))

Abstract

We present a Direct Visual Odometry (VO) algorithm for multi-camera rigs, that allows for flexible connections between cameras and runs in real-time at high frame rate on GPU for stereo setups. In contrast to feature-based VO methods, Direct VO aligns images directly to depth-enhanced previous images based on the photoconsistency of all high-contrast pixels. By using a multi-camera setup we can introduce an absolute scale into our reconstruction. Multiple views also allow us to obtain depth from multiple disparity sources: static disparity between the different cameras of the rig and temporal disparity by exploiting rig motion. We propose a joint optimization of the rig poses and the camera poses within the rig which enables working with flexible rigs. We show that sub-pixel rigidity is difficult to manufacture for 720p or higher resolution cameras which makes this feature important, particularly in current and future (semi-)autonomous cars or drones. Consequently, we evaluate our approach on own, real-world and synthetic datasets that exhibit flexibility in the rig beside sequences from established KITTI dataset.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Daimler AG, Germany. Real-world flexible stereo rig datasets were kindly provided by Dr. Senya Polikovsky, OSLab, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Tübingen.

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Correspondence to Benjamin Resch .

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Resch, B., Wei, J., Lensch, H.P.A. (2017). Real Time Direct Visual Odometry for Flexible Multi-camera Rigs. In: Lai, SH., Lepetit, V., Nishino, K., Sato, Y. (eds) Computer Vision – ACCV 2016. ACCV 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10114. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54190-7_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54190-7_31

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54190-7

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