Accurate quadrifocal tracking for robust 3D visual odometry

This paper describes a new image-based approach to tracking the 6dof trajectory of a stereo camera pair using a corresponding reference image pairs instead of explicit 3D feature reconstruction of the scene. A dense minimisation approach is employed which directly uses all grey-scale information available within the stereo pair (or stereo region) leading to very robust and precise results. Metric 3D structure constraints are imposed by consistently warping corresponding stereo images to generate novel viewpoints at each stereo acquisition. An iterative non-linear trajectory estimation approach is formulated based on a quadrifocal relationship between the image intensities within adjacent views of the stereo pair. A robust M-estimation technique is used to reject outliers corresponding to moving objects within the scene or other outliers such as occlusions and illumination changes. The technique is applied to recovering the trajectory of a moving vehicle in long and difficult sequences of images.