Monocular odometry in country roads based on phase‐derived optical flow and 4‐DOF ego‐motion model
Abstract
Purpose
Positioning is a key task in most field robotics applications but can be very challenging in GPS‐denied or high‐slip environments. The purpose of this paper is to describe a visual odometry strategy using only one camera in country roads.
Design/methodology/approach
This monocular odometery system uses as input only those images provided by a single camera mounted on the roof of the vehicle and the framework is composed of three main parts: image motion estimation, ego‐motion computation and visual odometry. The image motion is estimated based on a hyper‐complex wavelet phase‐derived optical flow field. The ego‐motion of the vehicle is computed by a blocked RANdom SAmple Consensus algorithm and a maximum likelihood estimator based on a 4‐degrees of freedom motion model. These as instantaneous ego‐motion measurements are used to update the vehicle trajectory according to a dead‐reckoning model and unscented Kalman filter.
Findings
The authors' proposed framework and algorithms are validated on videos from a real automotive platform. Furthermore, the recovered trajectory is superimposed onto a digital map, and the localization results from this method are compared to the ground truth measured with a GPS/INS joint system. These experimental results indicate that the framework and the algorithms are effective.
Originality/value
The effective framework and algorithms for visual odometry using only one camera in country roads are introduced in this paper.
Keywords
Citation
Wang, C., Zhao, C. and Yang, J. (2011), "Monocular odometry in country roads based on phase‐derived optical flow and 4‐DOF ego‐motion model", Industrial Robot, Vol. 38 No. 5, pp. 509-520. https://doi.org/10.1108/01439911111154081
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited