Evaluating Visual Odometry Methods for Autonomous Driving in Rain

TL;DR

This paper assesses the robustness of various visual odometry algorithms, including a DROID-SLAM heuristic, under rainy conditions for autonomous driving, highlighting their strengths and limitations in adverse weather.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive evaluation of visual odometry methods in rainy weather, introducing a DROID-SLAM based heuristic approach and comparing it with existing algorithms.

Findings

DF-VO performs best for short-range (<500m) in rain.

DROID-SLAM heuristic is effective for long-term localization in rain.

Both methods need sensor fusion for improved rain robustness.

Abstract

The increasing demand for autonomous vehicles has created a need for robust navigation systems that can also operate effectively in adverse weather conditions. Visual odometry is a technique used in these navigation systems, enabling the estimation of vehicle position and motion using input from onboard cameras. However, visual odometry accuracy can be significantly impacted in challenging weather conditions, such as heavy rain, snow, or fog. In this paper, we evaluate a range of visual odometry methods, including our DROID-SLAM based heuristic approach. Specifically, these algorithms are tested on both clear and rainy weather urban driving data to evaluate their robustness. We compiled a dataset comprising of a range of rainy weather conditions from different cities. This includes, the Oxford Robotcar dataset from Oxford, the 4Seasons dataset from Munich and an internal dataset collected in Singapore. We evaluated different visual odometry algorithms for both monocular and stereo camera setups using the Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE). From the range of approaches evaluated, our findings suggest that the Depth and Flow for Visual Odometry (DF-VO) algorithm with monocular setup performed the best for short range distances (< 500m) and our proposed DROID-SLAM based heuristic approach for the stereo setup performed relatively well for long-term localization. Both VO algorithms suggested a need for a more robust sensor fusion based approach for localization in rain.