Direct Sparse Odometry with Rolling Shutter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a direct monocular visual odometry method that models rolling-shutter effects, improving accuracy and robustness in sequences with rolling-shutter cameras by incorporating velocity estimation and a constant-velocity prior.

Contribution

It extends direct sparse odometry to account for rolling-shutter distortions, enabling near real-time, more accurate VO in challenging sequences.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art global-shutter VO on rolling-shutter sequences

Achieves near real-time performance with improved accuracy

Effectively models rolling-shutter effects through velocity estimation

Abstract

Neglecting the effects of rolling-shutter cameras for visual odometry (VO) severely degrades accuracy and robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel direct monocular VO method that incorporates a rolling-shutter model. Our approach extends direct sparse odometry which performs direct bundle adjustment of a set of recent keyframe poses and the depths of a sparse set of image points. We estimate the velocity at each keyframe and impose a constant-velocity prior for the optimization. In this way, we obtain a near real-time, accurate direct VO method. Our approach achieves improved results on challenging rolling-shutter sequences over state-of-the-art global-shutter VO.