A Photometrically Calibrated Benchmark For Monocular Visual Odometry
This provides a new benchmark for researchers in computer vision and robotics to evaluate monocular visual odometry methods more accurately, but it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets by adding photometric calibration.
The authors tackled the lack of photometrically calibrated datasets for monocular visual odometry by creating a benchmark with 50 real-world sequences and over 100 minutes of video, and they evaluated two existing methods (ORB-SLAM and DSO) to analyze factors like image resolution and camera motion.
We present a dataset for evaluating the tracking accuracy of monocular visual odometry and SLAM methods. It contains 50 real-world sequences comprising more than 100 minutes of video, recorded across dozens of different environments -- ranging from narrow indoor corridors to wide outdoor scenes. All sequences contain mostly exploring camera motion, starting and ending at the same position. This allows to evaluate tracking accuracy via the accumulated drift from start to end, without requiring ground truth for the full sequence. In contrast to existing datasets, all sequences are photometrically calibrated. We provide exposure times for each frame as reported by the sensor, the camera response function, and dense lens attenuation factors. We also propose a novel, simple approach to non-parametric vignette calibration, which requires minimal set-up and is easy to reproduce. Finally, we thoroughly evaluate two existing methods (ORB-SLAM and DSO) on the dataset, including an analysis of the effect of image resolution, camera field of view, and the camera motion direction.