Kinematic constraints in visual odometry of intelligent vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method to realize on-board visual odometry system. Vehicular kinematic constrain is used in the motion estimation algorithms. The work is a extension from planar steering model to 3-dof in which vehicle's motion is modeled more reasonable and accurate. By virtue of appropriate simplification, the close-form solution of motion parameters can be obtained only need to find real roots of a cubic equation. Then optimization based refine method can bring the winner solution to accurate solution utilizing inliers founded. The algorithm has been tested on both simulation platform and real car test and achieved promising results.