CFORB: Circular FREAK-ORB Visual Odometry
This addresses visual odometry for robotics or autonomous systems in varied environments, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with specific improvements.
The paper tackles visual odometry by proposing CFORB, a novel algorithm that combines ORB feature detection with FREAK descriptors and introduces new geometric constraints and a circular matching variation, achieving competitive errors such as 3.73% average translational error on the KITTI dataset.
We present a novel Visual Odometry algorithm entitled Circular FREAK-ORB (CFORB). This algorithm detects features using the well-known ORB algorithm [12] and computes feature descriptors using the FREAK algorithm [14]. CFORB is invariant to both rotation and scale changes, and is suitable for use in environments with uneven terrain. Two visual geometric constraints have been utilized in order to remove invalid feature descriptor matches. These constraints have not previously been utilized in a Visual Odometry algorithm. A variation to circular matching [16] has also been implemented. This allows features to be matched between images without having to be dependent upon the epipolar constraint. This algorithm has been run on the KITTI benchmark dataset and achieves a competitive average translational error of $3.73 \%$ and average rotational error of $0.0107 deg/m$. CFORB has also been run in an indoor environment and achieved an average translational error of $3.70 \%$. After running CFORB in a highly textured environment with an approximately uniform feature spread across the images, the algorithm achieves an average translational error of $2.4 \%$ and an average rotational error of $0.009 deg/m$.