Panoramic Direct LiDAR-assisted Visual Odometry

Enhancing visual odometry by exploiting sparse depth measurements from LiDAR is a promising solution for improving tracking accuracy of an odometry. Most existing works utilize a monocular pinhole camera, yet could suffer from poor robustness due to less available information from limited field-of-view (FOV). This paper proposes a panoramic direct LiDAR-assisted visual odometry, which fully associates the 360-degree FOV LiDAR points with the 360-degree FOV panoramic image datas. 360-degree FOV panoramic images can provide more available information, which can compensate inaccurate pose estimation caused by insufficient texture or motion blur from a single view. In addition to constraints between a specific view at different times, constraints can also be built between different views at the same moment. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the benefit of large FOV of our panoramic direct LiDAR-assisted visual odometry to state-of-the-art approaches.

A Fast Dynamic Point Detection Method for LiDAR-Inertial Odometry in Driving Scenarios

Existing 3D point-based dynamic point detection and removal methods have a significant time overhead, making them difficult to adapt to LiDAR-inertial odometry systems. This paper proposes a label consistency based dynamic point detection and removal method for handling moving vehicles and pedestrians in autonomous driving scenarios, and embeds the proposed dynamic point detection and removal method into a self-designed LiDAR-inertial odometry system. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that our method can accomplish the dynamic point detection and removal with extremely low computational overhead (i.e., 1$\sim$9ms) in LIO systems, meanwhile achieve comparable preservation rate and rejection rate to state-of-the-art methods and significantly enhance the accuracy of pose estimation. We have released the source code of this work for the development of the community.