BIT-VO: Visual Odometry at 300 FPS using Binary Features from the Focal Plane
This enables real-time, low-energy visual odometry for applications like robotics or autonomous systems, representing a novel application of focal-plane technology.
The paper tackles the problem of achieving high-speed visual odometry by developing BIT-VO, the first 6-DOF algorithm using a focal-plane sensor-processor, which operates at 300 FPS in natural scenes using binary features.
Focal-plane Sensor-processor (FPSP) is a next-generation camera technology which enables every pixel on the sensor chip to perform computation in parallel, on the focal plane where the light intensity is captured. SCAMP-5 is a general-purpose FPSP used in this work and it carries out computations in the analog domain before analog to digital conversion. By extracting features from the image on the focal plane, data which is digitized and transferred is reduced. As a consequence, SCAMP-5 offers a high frame rate while maintaining low energy consumption. Here, we present BIT-VO, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first 6 Degrees of Freedom visual odometry algorithm which utilises the FPSP. Our entire system operates at 300 FPS in a natural scene, using binary edges and corner features detected by the SCAMP-5.