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arXiv · 2109.14828

Uncertainty Estimation of Dense Optical-Flow for Robust Visual Navigation

Yonhon Ng·Hongdong Li·Jonghyuk Kim
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Abstract

This paper presents a novel dense optical-flow algorithm to solve the monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem for ground or aerial robots. Dense optical flow can effectively provide the ego-motion of the vehicle while enabling collision avoidance with the potential obstacles. Existing work has not fully utilized the uncertainty of the optical flow -- at most an isotropic Gaussian density model. We estimate the full uncertainty of the optical flow and propose a new eight-point algorithm based on the statistical Mahalanobis distance. Combined with the pose-graph optimization, the proposed method demonstrates enhanced robustness and accuracy for the public autonomous car dataset (KITTI) and aerial monocular dataset.

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Yonhon Ng, Hongdong Li, Jonghyuk Kim. 2021-09-30. Uncertainty Estimation of Dense Optical-Flow for Robust Visual Navigation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.14828

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