GPS and stereovision-based visual odometry: Application to urban scene mapping and intelligent vehicle localization

Abstract

We propose an approach for vehicle localization in dense urban environments using a stereoscopic system and a GPS sensor. Stereoscopic system is used to capture the stereo video flow, to recover the environments, and to estimate the vehicle motion based on feature detection, matching, and triangulation from every image pair. A relative depth constraint is applied to eliminate the tracking couples which are inconsistent with the vehicle ego-motion. Then the optimal rotation and translation between the current and the reference frames are computed using an RANSAC based minimization method. Meanwhile, GPS positions are obtained by an on-board GPS receiver and periodically used to adjust the vehicle orientations and positions estimated by stereovision. The proposed method is tested with two real sequences obtained by a GEM vehicle equipped with a stereoscopic system and a RTK-GPS receiver. The results show that the vision/GPS integrated trajectory can fit the ground truth better than the vision-only method, especially for the vehicle orientation. And vice-versa, the stereovision-based motion estimation method can correct the GPS signal failures (e.g., GPS jumps) due to multipath problem or other noises. © 2011 Lijun Wei et al.