Semi-independent stereo visual odometry for different field of view cameras

Abstract

This paper presents a pipeline for stereo visual odometry using cameras with different fields of view. It gives a proof of concept about how a constraint on the respective field of view of each camera can lead to both an accurate 3D reconstruction and a robust pose estimation. Indeed, when considering a fixed resolution, a narrow field of view has a higher angular resolution and can preserve image texture details. On the other hand, a wide field of view allows to track features over longer periods since the overlap between two successive frames is more substantial. We propose a semi-independent stereo system where each camera performs individually temporal multi-view optimization but their initial parameters are still jointly optimized in an iterative framework. Furthermore, the concept of lead and follow camera is introduced to adaptively propagate information between the cameras. We evaluate the method qualitatively on two indoor datasets, and quantitatively on a synthetic dataset to allow the comparison across different fields of view.