Multi-Camera Sensor Fusion for Visual Odometry using Deep Uncertainty Estimation
This addresses the issue of single-camera failures in visual odometry for autonomous vehicles, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of visual odometry for autonomous driving by proposing a deep sensor fusion framework that uses multiple cameras and uncertainty estimation, achieving state-of-the-art results on the nuScenes dataset with robust and accurate trajectory estimates.
Visual Odometry (VO) estimation is an important source of information for vehicle state estimation and autonomous driving. Recently, deep learning based approaches have begun to appear in the literature. However, in the context of driving, single sensor based approaches are often prone to failure because of degraded image quality due to environmental factors, camera placement, etc. To address this issue, we propose a deep sensor fusion framework which estimates vehicle motion using both pose and uncertainty estimations from multiple on-board cameras. We extract spatio-temporal feature representations from a set of consecutive images using a hybrid CNN - RNN model. We then utilise a Mixture Density Network (MDN) to estimate the 6-DoF pose as a mixture of distributions and a fusion module to estimate the final pose using MDN outputs from multi-cameras. We evaluate our approach on the publicly available, large scale autonomous vehicle dataset, nuScenes. The results show that the proposed fusion approach surpasses the state-of-the-art, and provides robust estimates and accurate trajectories compared to individual camera-based estimations.