Cameras and 2D laser scanners, in combination, are able to provide low-cost, light-weight and accurate solutions, which make their fusion well-suited for many robot navigation tasks. However, correct data fusion depends on precise calibration of the rigid body transform between the sensors. In this paper we present the first framework that makes use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for odometry estimation fusing 2D laser scanners and mono-cameras. The use of CNNs provides the tools to not only extract the features from the two sensors, but also to fuse and match them without needing a calibration between the sensors. We transform the odometry estimation into an ordinal classification problem in order to find accurate rotation and translation values between consecutive frames. Results on a real road dataset show that the fusion network runs in real-time and is able to improve the odometry estimation of a single sensor alone by learning how to fuse two different types of data information.
We present the first deep learning method for odometry estimation based on the fusion of a 2D laser scanner and a camera. The proposed network is able to provide a real-time solution that overcome the difficulties enconter by one sensor alone. We also present how to transform the odometry regression problem into a into a series of simpler binary classification subproblems, known as ordinal classification. Finally, we explore this solution in outdoor environments, training and testing it with the KITTI @cite_22 dataset, which contains sequences on different types of scenarios.
@cite_22
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This paper presents a deep network based unsupervised visual odometry system for 6-DoF camera pose estimation and finding dense depth map for its monocular view. The proposed network is trained using unlabeled binocular stereo image pairs and is shown to provide superior performance in depth and ego-motion estimation compared to the existing state-of-the-art. This is achieved by introducing a novel objective function and training the network using temporally alligned sequences of monocular images. The objective function is based on the Charbonnier penalty applied to spatial and bi-directional temporal reconstruction losses. The overall novelty of the approach lies in the fact that the proposed deep framework combines a disparity-based depth estimation network with a pose estimation network to obtain absolute scale-aware 6-DoF camera pose and superior depth map. According to our knowledge, such a framework with complete unsupervised end-to-end learning has not been tried so far, making it a novel contribution in the field. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through performance comparison with the state-of-the-art methods on KITTI driving dataset. We propose a real-time method for odometry and mapping using range measurements from a 2-axis lidar moving in 6-DOF. The problem is hard because the range measurements are received at different times, and errors in motion estimation can cause mis-registration of the resulting point cloud. To date, coherent 3D maps can be built by off-line batch methods, often using loop closure to correct for drift over time. Our method achieves both low-drift and low-computational complexity without the need for high accuracy ranging or inertial measurements. The key idea in obtaining this level of performance is the division of the complex problem of simultaneous localization and mapping, which seeks to optimize a large number of variables simultaneously, by two algorithms. One algorithm performs odometry at a high frequency but low fidelity to estimate velocity of the lidar. Another algorithm runs at a frequency of an order of magnitude lower for fine matching and registration of the point cloud. Combination of the two algorithms allows the method to map in real-time. The method has been evaluated by a large set of experiments as well as on the KITTI odometry benchmark. The results indicate that the method can achieve accuracy at the level of state of the art offline batch methods. We present a novel method to fuse the power of deep networks with the computational efficiency of geometric and probabilistic localization algorithms. In contrast to other methods that completely replace a classical visual estimator with a deep network, we propose an approach that uses a convolutional neural network to learn difficult-to-model corrections to the estimator from ground-truth training data. To this end, we derive a novel loss function for learning SE(3) corrections based on a matrix Lie groups approach, with a natural formulation for balancing translation and rotation errors. We use this loss to train a deep pose correction network (DPC-Net) that predicts corrections for a particular estimator, sensor and environment. Using the KITTI odometry dataset, we demonstrate significant improvements to the accuracy of a computationally-efficient sparse stereo visual odometry pipeline, that render it as accurate as a modern computationally-intensive dense estimator. Further, we show how DPC-Net can be used to mitigate the effect of poorly calibrated lens distortion parameters. Despite learning based methods showing promising results in single view depth estimation and visual odometry, most existing approaches treat the tasks in a supervised manner. Recent approaches to single view depth estimation explore the possibility of learning without full supervision via minimizing photometric error. In this paper, we explore the use of stereo sequences for learning depth and visual odometry. The use of stereo sequences enables the use of both spatial (between left-right pairs) and temporal (forward backward) photometric warp error, and constrains the scene depth and camera motion to be in a common, real-world scale. At test time our framework is able to estimate single view depth and two-view odometry from a monocular sequence. We also show how we can improve on a standard photometric warp loss by considering a warp of deep features. We show through extensive experiments that: (i) jointly training for single view depth and visual odometry improves depth prediction because of the additional constraint imposed on depths and achieves competitive results for visual odometry; (ii) deep feature-based warping loss improves upon simple photometric warp loss for both single view depth estimation and visual odometry. Our method outperforms existing learning based methods on the KITTI driving dataset in both tasks. The source code is available at this https URL