Fig. 1. Top row: ORB-SLAM2 [1] tracks on KITTI [2] images. Middle row: ORB-SLAM2 tracks with DOT segmentation masks, which differentiate between moving and static objects. Bottom row: ORB-SLAM2 tracks using Detectron2 [3] segmentation masks, encoding all potentially dynamic objects. Note how DOT segments out actually moving objects (e.g., moving cars), while keeping the static ones (e.g., parked cars).
This paper presents an information-theoretic approach to point selection for direct RGB-D odometry. The aim is to select only the most informative measurements, in order to reduce the optimization problem with a minimal impact in the accuracy. It is usual practice in visual odometry/SLAM to track several hundreds of points, achieving real-time performance in high-end desktop PCs. Reducing their computational footprint will facilitate the implementation of odometry and SLAM in low-end platforms such as small robots and AR/VR glasses. Our experimental results show that our novel information-based selection criteria allows us to reduce the number of tracked points an order of magnitude (down to only 24 of them), achieving an accuracy similar to the state of the art (sometimes outperforming it) while reducing 10× the computational demand.
In this work, we derive a model for the covariance of the visual residuals in multi-view SfM, odometry and SLAM setups. The core of our approach is the formulation of the residual covariances as a combination of geometric and photometric noise sources. And our key novel contribution is the derivation of a term modelling how local 2D patches suffer from perspective deformation when imaging 3D surfaces around a point. Together, these add up to an efficient and general formulation which not only improves the accuracy of both feature-based and direct methods, but can also be used to estimate more accurate measures of the state entropy and hence better founded point visibility thresholds. We validate our model with synthetic and real data and integrate it into photometric and feature-based Bundle Adjustment, improving their accuracy with a negligible overhead.
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