A Robust Pavement Mapping System Based on Normal-Constrained Stereo Visual Odometry
This work addresses a domain-specific issue for civil infrastructure maintenance using UAVs, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of large drift in visual odometry for pavement mapping by integrating normal constraints into the pose optimization, resulting in a 20% improvement in absolute trajectory error compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Pavement condition is crucial for civil infrastructure maintenance. This task usually requires efficient road damage localization, which can be accomplished by the visual odometry system embedded in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, the state-of-the-art visual odometry and mapping methods suffer from large drift under the degeneration of the scene structure. To alleviate this issue, we integrate normal constraints into the visual odometry process, which greatly helps to avoid large drift. By parameterizing the normal vector on the tangential plane, the normal factors are coupled with traditional reprojection factors in the pose optimization procedure. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. The overall absolute trajectory error is improved by approximately 20%, which indicates that the estimated trajectory is much more accurate than that obtained using other state-of-the-art methods.