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Concept
Visual odometry
Summary
In robotics and computer vision, visual odometry is the process of determining the position and orientation of a robot by analyzing the associated camera images. It has been used in a wide variety of robotic applications, such as on the Mars Exploration Rovers.
In navigation, odometry is the use of data from the movement of actuators to estimate change in position over time through devices such as rotary encoders to measure wheel rotations. While useful for many wheeled or tracked vehicles, traditional odometry techniques cannot be applied to mobile robots with non-standard locomotion methods, such as legged robots. In addition, odometry universally suffers from precision problems, since wheels tend to slip and slide on the floor creating a non-uniform distance traveled as compared to the wheel rotations. The error is compounded when the vehicle operates on non-smooth surfaces. Odometry readings become increasingly unreliable as these errors accumulate and compound over time.
Visual odometry is the process of determining equivalent odometry information using sequential camera images to estimate the distance traveled. Visual odometry allows for enhanced navigational accuracy in robots or vehicles using any type of locomotion on any surface.
There are various types of VO.
Depending on the camera setup, VO can be categorized as Monocular VO (single camera), Stereo VO (two camera in stereo setup).
Traditional VO's visual information is obtained by the feature-based method, which extracts the image feature points and tracks them in the image sequence. Recent developments in VO research provided an alternative, called the direct method, which uses pixel intensity in the image sequence directly as visual input. There are also hybrid methods.
If an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is used within the VO system, it is commonly referred to as Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO).
Most existing approaches to visual odometry are based on the following stages.
Acquire input images: using either single cameras., stereo cameras, or omnidirectional cameras.
Official source
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