Ground Plane based Absolute Scale Estimation for Monocular Visual Odometry

TL;DR

This paper introduces a ground plane and camera height-based method for absolute scale estimation in monocular visual odometry, improving scale accuracy and reducing drift in monocular systems.

Contribution

It proposes a robust divide and conquer approach leveraging ground plane cues for scale estimation and a scale correction strategy to enhance monocular VO accuracy.

Findings

Effective scale correction reduces drift in monocular VO

Method verified on public and self-collected sequences

Improves robustness of scale estimation in monocular systems

Abstract

Recovering the absolute metric scale from a monocular camera is a challenging but highly desirable problem for monocular camera-based systems. By using different kinds of cues, various approaches have been proposed for scale estimation, such as camera height, object size etc. In this paper, firstly, we summarize different kinds of scale estimation approaches. Then, we propose a robust divide and conquer the absolute scale estimation method based on the ground plane and camera height by analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. By using the estimated scale, an effective scale correction strategy has been proposed to reduce the scale drift during the Monocular Visual Odometry (VO) estimation process. Finally, the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method have been verified on both public and self-collected image sequences.