Motion priors estimation for robust matching initialization in automotive applications

Abstract

Tracking keypoints through a video sequence is a crucial first step in the processing chain of many visual SLAM approaches. This paper presents a robust initialization method to provide the initial match for a keypoint tracker, from the 1st frame where a keypoint is detected to the 2nd frame, that is: when no depth information is available. We deal explicitly with the case of long displacements. The starting position is obtained through an optimization that employs a distribution of motion priors based on pyramidal phase correlation, and epipolar geometry constraints. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the significant impact of applying a motion prior to the matching. We provide detailed comparisons to the state-of-the-art methods.