Uncertainty Estimation of Dense Optical-Flow for Robust Visual Navigation
This addresses robust visual navigation for ground or aerial robots, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing dense optical-flow and pose-graph optimization methods.
The paper tackles monocular SLAM for robots by developing a dense optical-flow algorithm that estimates full flow uncertainty using a Mahalanobis distance-based eight-point method, demonstrating improved robustness and accuracy on KITTI and aerial datasets.
This paper presents a novel dense optical-flow algorithm to solve the monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem for ground or aerial robots. Dense optical flow can effectively provide the ego-motion of the vehicle while enabling collision avoidance with the potential obstacles. Existing work has not fully utilized the uncertainty of the optical flow -- at most an isotropic Gaussian density model. We estimate the full uncertainty of the optical flow and propose a new eight-point algorithm based on the statistical Mahalanobis distance. Combined with the pose-graph optimization, the proposed method demonstrates enhanced robustness and accuracy for the public autonomous car dataset (KITTI) and aerial monocular dataset.