Visual Odometry

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Visual odometry estimates how a camera moves through a scene over time, providing motion information for robots and vehicles when GPS or other positioning systems are unavailable. Geometric methods track points, lines, or image intensities and refine poses with tools such as optical flow, epipolar geometry, filtering, and bundle adjustment; learned methods predict motion or improve matching, often combining both approaches. Work spans monocular, stereo, RGB-D, event-camera, and multi-sensor systems, with growing attention to long sequences, dynamic scenes, sparse observations, and real-time deployment. A central challenge is balancing accuracy and low drift with robustness to changing environments, uncertain scale or calibration, and limited computation, as evaluated on benchmarks such as KITTI, EuRoC, TUM-RGBD, and TartanAir.

Latest papers

56 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, down 14% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Jun 2, 2026

PixVOD: Pixel-Distributed Direct Visual Odometry and Depth Estimation

Images composed of 2D pixel arrays are the standard input to computer vision algorithms, yet many underlying computations can be distributed across pixels. Transmitting raw, redundant, and noisy pixel data off the sensor remains inefficient, motivating a shift toward focal-plane sensor-processors that perform a significant part of the computation directly within each pixel. We envision pixels synthesizing higher-level signals locally, reducing downstream load, and providing richer inputs for higher-level vision tasks. We propose a fully parallelizable form of visual odometry and depth estimation across pixels, where sensor-processors exchange information through Gaussian Belief Propagation (GBP) to achieve consensus about camera motion and infer depth from per-pixel photometric observations and a surface normal prior. To maintain geometric stability during optimization, we introduce a keyframe-like anchoring mechanism that regulates the effective baseline between frames, enabling consistent motion and depth updates. Our method is evaluated on realistic datasets, demonstrating the feasibility of GBP-based pixel-level distributed odometry and depth estimation with keyframe anchoring on-sensor. Project Page: https://www.shinjeongkim.com/pixvod/

Shinjeong Kim, Ignacio Alzugaray, Callum Rhodes +2

Department of Computing, Imperial College London

Depth Estimation Visual Odometry In-Sensor Computing Gaussian Belief Propagation

May 30, 2026

BEVIO: Efficient Bird's-Eye-View based Sparse-Update Visual-Inertial Odometry for Lunar Day-Night Navigation

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) provides smooth, high-rate state estimates and has been widely used for robotic navigation in both terrestrial and planetary applications. However, its performance is typically dependent on the frequency of visual updates, which is a challenge for planetary rovers operating under extreme resource constraints and low frame rates. This work investigates enabling reliable VIO with very sparse visual updates for lunar rover applications, addressing both day and night-time operations where feature associations become especially difficult under self-illumination conditions. We propose a Bird's Eye View (BEV)-based image matching scheme that remains robust to larger inter-frame motions and more reliable feature matching despite significant visual appearance changes. We extensively evaluate our proposed approach, BEVIO, through high-fidelity photorealistic lunar and real-time robotic experiments conducted using a half-scale lunar rover, in a long-term day-night deployment at Plaster City, CA, USA. The results demonstrate that our method enables reliable day and nighttime self-illuminated traverses at visual update rates as low as 0.25 Hz, underscoring its suitability for navigation on power- and compute-limited lunar rovers.

Mohit Singh, Shehryar Khattak, Ashish Goel +3

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. · Autonomous Robots Lab at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Robot Navigation Visual Odometry Bird's-Eye-View Representation Visual-Inertial Odometry

May 27, 2026

Con-DSO: Learning Short-Horizon Consistency Priors for RGB-D Direct Sparse Odometry

RGB-D direct visual odometry (VO) benefits from metric depth measurements but often degrades in the presence of dynamic objects, occlusions, illumination changes, and unreliable depth, which violate the photometric and geometric consistency assumptions of direct alignment. We propose Con-DSO, a consistency-aware RGB-D direct sparse odometry framework that addresses these challenges through a unified learned uncertainty model. A dual-branch consistency network is trained on adjacent RGB-D frame pairs using flow-guided photometric errors and projective depth-consistency errors to predict pixel-level photometric and geometric uncertainty. The predicted uncertainty is first converted into pairwise quality to guide support-pixel selection and is then fused across adjacent frame pairs to form a host-side quality prior for keyframe-based tracking. To account for the different roles of photometric and depth information in direct RGB-D optimization, the quality prior is incorporated through a decoupled photometric-geometric weighting scheme, with the geometric weight applied only to the translational component of pose estimation. Experiments on five public RGB-D benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over direct RGB-D odometry baselines, achieving more than 20% reduction in absolute trajectory error on ICL-NUIM and approximately 50% to 80% reductions on RGB-D Scenes V2, TUM/BONN, and OpenLORIS. These results demonstrate that learned consistency-aware uncertainty can substantially improve the robustness of RGB-D direct visual odometry in challenging environments.

Haolan Zhang, Thanh Nguyen Canh, Chenghao Li +3

School of Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi 923-1211, Japan

Multi-View Consistency Uncertainty Quantification Visual Odometry

May 26, 2026

Design of a Real-time Asynchronous Monocular Odometry for Planetary Exploration

We describe our preliminary design of a real-time asynchronous event-based monocular odometry for planetary exploration. Operating under strict computational constraints, planetary rovers frequently encounter complex, unpredictable environments that demand high-speed sensing and robustness to high dynamic range (HDR) lighting. Event cameras address these needs by reporting asynchronous, pixel-wise brightness changes with microsecond resolution, significantly reducing data bandwidth while maintaining robustness in extreme lighting conditions. We propose an approach based on an Error-State Kalman Filter (ESKF) that leverages this asynchronous event stream to continuously estimate camera ego-motion. The camera state is updated with every tracked position output generated by RATE, a real-time asynchronous feature tracker.

Benat Inigo, Florian Steidle, Wolfgang Stuerzl

Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics German Aerospace Center (DLR) · University of Zaragoza

Event-Based Vision Error-State Kalman Filtering Visual Odometry

May 21, 2026

Extending Deep Event Visual Odometry with Sparse Point-Cloud Export

Event cameras are well suited for visual odometry under high-speed motion and challenging lighting conditions due to their low latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. Deep Event Visual Odometry (DEVO) demonstrated that monocular event-only odometry can achieve strong performance by combining sparse patch tracking, learned patch selection, recurrent correspondence refinement, and differentiable bundle adjustment. In this project, we extend DEVO with a sparse point-cloud export pipeline. Rather than modifying the core odometry formulation, our approach exposes the internal 3D structure already estimated by DEVO and converts it into an explicit point-cloud representation for visualization and further processing. In addition, we implement a practical workflow for data export, format conversion, and point-cloud cleanup. The resulting system preserves the original visual odometry pipeline while enabling sparse geometric scene output. Experiments on the BOARD SLOW sequence show that the exported sparse cloud is locally consistent with EMVS reconstructions, achieving high precision at a 5 cm threshold, while also highlighting the expected limitations in density, completeness, and sensitivity to accumulated odometry noise.

Alireza Safdari, Sajad Ashraf

TU Berlin

Event-Based Vision Visual Odometry Point Cloud Generation

May 19, 2026

EpiDiffVO: Geometry-Aware Epipolar Diffusion for Robust Visual Odometry

Estimating relative pose from image pairs fundamentally requires only a minimal subset of geometrically consistent correspondences. However, most learning-based approaches rely on dense matching or direct regression, leading to redundancy and reduced geometric interpretability. In this work, we propose a sparse epipolar matching framework that predicts a compact set of correspondences optimized for geometric consistency across varying temporal baselines. To address residual noise and misalignment, we introduce an epipolar diffusion process that models correspondence uncertainty and refines keypoints toward epipolar consistency. The refined correspondences, along with depth cues, are lifted into a graph representation forming a Steiner graph that encodes relational structure between points. A graph neural network learns a compact subset of informative correspondences, which are passed to a differentiable singular value decomposition solver for end-to-end geometric estimation. Relative pose is recovered from the resulting essential matrix and evaluated in a visual odometry setting on the TartanAir and KITTI SLAM datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that combining sparse matching, diffusion-based refinement, and graph-based subset selection reduces correspondence redundancy while maintaining robust pose estimation across challenging baselines.

Prateeth Rao

International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, Bengaluru, India

Multi-View Geometry Relative Pose Estimation Camera Pose Estimation Visual Odometry Diffusion Models

May 16, 2026

Rethinking the State Update Gate for Long-Sequence Recurrent 3D Reconstruction

Streaming 3D reconstruction under a strict constant-memory budget hinges on how the recurrent state is updated as the stream evolves. We profile TTT3R-style per-token gates across five benchmarks and discover a structural bottleneck: the gate is intrinsically bounded in magnitude (median

0.31

; never exceeding

0.6

) and nearly frame-invariant, yielding an effective memory horizon of only

\sim

3 frames per state token, which serves as the structural origin of long-sequence drift. We trace this to a missing axis: existing inference-time methods modulate updates only at the per-token, intra-frame level, while the orthogonal frame-level question of how strongly each frame should contribute to the state has been treated as content-independent. We close this gap with a scalar frame-level gate

α_t \in (0, 1]

derived in closed form from frame-to-frame changes of internal features---a graded write weight, inspired by classical Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) keyframe selection, that never discards a frame and requires no parameters, no training, and no extra forward pass. Across six benchmarks spanning camera pose, video depth, and 3D reconstruction at sequence lengths up to

4,661

frames, our gate cuts ATE by

51\%

on long TUM-RGBD pose sequences, reduces AbsRel by

13.0\%

on Bonn video depth, and on KITTI long-sequence pose estimation surpasses both LongStream and Keyframe-VO in average ATE, while retaining strictly constant memory at zero training cost.

Kejun Ren, Lei Jin, Tianxin Huang +2

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China · School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong

Streaming 3D Reconstruction 3D Reconstruction Depth Estimation Recurrent Neural Networks Visual Odometry Video Depth Estimation

May 8, 2026

Rebalancing gradient to improve self-supervised co-training of depth, odometry and optical flow predictions

We present CoopNet, an approach that improves the cooperation of co-trained networks by dynamically adapting the apportionment of gradient, to ensure equitable learning progress. It is applied to motion-aware self-supervised prediction of depth maps, by introducing a new hybrid loss, based on a distribution model of photo-metric reconstruction errors made by, on the one hand the depth + odometry paired networks, and on the other hand the optical flow network. This model essentially assumes that the pixels from moving objects (that must be discarded for training depth and odometry), correspond to those where the two reconstructions strongly disagree. We justify this model by theoretical considerations and experimental evidences. A comparative evaluation on KITTI and CityScapes datasets shows that CoopNet improves or is comparable to the state-of-the-art in depth, odometry and optical flow predictions.

Marwane Hariat, Antoine Manzanera, David Filliat

1U2IS, ENSTA Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France · 2INRIA FLOWERS

Optical Flow Self-Supervised Learning Monocular Depth Estimation Multi-Task Learning Visual Odometry

Apr 27, 2026

Event-based SLAM Benchmark for High-Speed Maneuvers

Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors with pixels that independently and asynchronously respond to brightness changes at microsecond resolution, offering the potential to handle visual tasks in high-speed maneuvering scenarios. Existing event-based approaches, although successful in mitigating motion blur caused by high-speed maneuvers, suffer from many limitations. Some of them highlight a success of pose tracking for a fronto-parallel fast shaking camera closed to the structure, while others assume pure (optionally aggressive) three-degree-of-freedom rotations. The former requires persistent local map visibility within the field of view (FOV), whereas the latter fails to generalize to six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) motions where both linear and angular velocities may be large. Consequently, current successes do not fully demonstrate that event-based state estimation under arbitrary aggressive maneuvers is a fully solved problem. To quantitatively assess the extent to which the potential of event cameras has been unlocked, we conduct a thorough analysis of state-of-the-art (SOTA) event-based visual odometry (VO)/visual-inertial odometry (VIO) methods and report shortcomings in current public datasets. Furthermore, we introduce a benchmarking framework for event-based state estimation, called EvSLAM, characterized by sufficient variation in data collection platforms, diverse extreme lighting scenarios, and a wide scope of challenging motion patterns under a clear and rigorous definition of high-speed maneuvers for mobile robots, along with a novel evaluation metric designed to fairly assess the operational limits of event-based solutions. This framework benchmarks state-of-the-art methods, yielding insights into optimal architectures and persistent challenges.

Sheng Zhong, Junkai Niu, Guillermo Gallego +7

Neuro-morphic Automation and Intelligence Lab (NAIL) at the School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha, China. · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin, the Science of Intelligence Excellence Cluster, the Robotics Institute Germany and the Einstein Center Digital Future, Berlin, Germany. · College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China. +2

Event-Based Vision Visual Odometry Visual-Inertial Odometry

Apr 24, 2026

Railway Artificial Intelligence Learning Benchmark (RAIL-BENCH): A Benchmark Suite for Perception in the Railway Domain

Automated train operation on existing railway infrastructure requires robust camera-based perception, yet the railway domain lacks public benchmark suites with standardized evaluation protocols that would enable reproducible comparison of approaches. We present RAIL-BENCH, the first perception benchmark suite for the railway domain. It comprises five challenges - rail track detection, object detection, vegetation segmentation, multi-object tracking, and monocular visual odometry - each tailored to the specific characteristics of railway environments. RAIL-BENCH provides curated training and test datasets drawn from diverse real-world scenarios, evaluation metrics, and public scoreboards (https://www.mrt.kit.edu/railbench). For the rail track detection challenge we introduce LineAP, a novel segment-based average precision metric that evaluates the geometric accuracy of polyline predictions independently of instance-level grouping, addressing key limitations of existing line detection metrics.

Annika Bätz, Pavel Klasek, Seo-Young Ham +3

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Engler-Bunte-Ring 21, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany · Deutsches Zentrum für Schienenverkehrsforschung (DZSF), August-Bebel-Straße 10, 01219 Dresden, Germany · DB InfraGO AG, EUREF-Campus 17, 10829 Berlin, Germany

Visual Odometry Object Detection Multi-Object Tracking

Apr 24, 2026

PoseFM: Relative Camera Pose Estimation Through Flow Matching

Monocular visual odometry (VO) is a fundamental computer vision problem with applications in autonomous navigation, augmented reality and more. While deep learning-based methods have recently shown superior accuracy compared to traditional geometric pipelines, particularly in environments where handcrafted features struggle due to poor structure or lighting conditions, most rely on deterministic regression, which lacks the uncertainty awareness required for robust applications. We propose PoseFM, the first framework to reformulate monocular frame-to-frame VO as a generative task using Flow Matching (FM). By leveraging FM, we model camera motion as a distribution rather than a point estimate, learning to transform noise into realistic pose predictions via continuous-time ODEs. This approach provides a principled mechanism for uncertainty estimation and enables robust motion inference under challenging visual conditions. In our evaluations, PoseFM achieves strong performance on TartanAir, KITTI and TUM-RGBD benchmarks, achieving the lowest absolute trajectory error (ATE) on some of the trajectories and overall being competitive with the best frame-to-frame monocular VO methods. Code and model checkpoints will be made available at https://github.com/helsinki-sda-group/posefm.

Dominik Kuczkowski, Laura Ruotsalainen

Department of Computer Science University of Helsinki Finland

Relative Pose Estimation Camera Pose Estimation Visual Odometry

Apr 8, 2026

Mem3R: Streaming 3D Reconstruction with Hybrid Memory

Streaming 3D perception is well suited to robotics and augmented reality, where long visual streams must be processed efficiently and consistently. Recent recurrent models offer a promising solution by maintaining fixed-size states and enabling linear-time inference, but they often suffer from temporal forgetting over long sequences due to the limited capacity of compressed memories. We propose Mem3R, a streaming 3D reconstruction model with a hybrid memory design that decouples camera tracking from geometric mapping to improve temporal consistency over long sequences. For camera tracking, Mem3R employs an implicit fast-weight memory implemented as a lightweight Multi-Layer Perceptron updated via Test-Time Training. For geometric mapping, Mem3R maintains an explicit token-based fixed-size state. Compared with CUT3R, this design not only significantly improves long-sequence performance but also reduces the model size from 793M to 644M parameters. Mem3R supports existing improved plug-and-play state update strategies developed for CUT3R. Specifically, Mem3R combined with TTT3R reduces absolute trajectory error by up to 39% relative to CUT3R combined with TTT3R on 500- to 1000-frame sequences from the TUM Dynamics dataset. The resulting improvements also extend to other downstream tasks, including video depth estimation and 3D reconstruction. Project page: https://lck666666.github.io/Mem3R/.

Changkun Liu, Jiezhi Yang, Zeman Li +4

Google · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · University of Southern California

Streaming 3D Reconstruction Memory-Augmented Neural Networks Visual Odometry

Apr 8, 2026

VGGT-SLAM++

We introduce VGGT-SLAM++, a complete visual SLAM system that leverages the geometry-rich outputs of the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT). The system comprises a visual odometry (front-end) fusing the VGGT feed-forward transformer and a Sim(3) solution, a Digital Elevation Map (DEM)-based graph construction module, and a back-end that jointly enable accurate large-scale mapping with bounded memory. While prior transformer-based SLAM pipelines such as VGGT-SLAM rely primarily on sparse loop closures or global Sim(3) manifold constraints - allowing short-horizon pose drift - VGGT-SLAM++ restores high-cadence local bundle adjustment (LBA) through a spatially corrective back-end. For each VGGT submap, we construct a dense planar-canonical DEM, partition it into patches, and compute their DINOv2 embeddings to integrate the submap into a covisibility graph. Spatial neighbors are retrieved using a Visual Place Recognition (VPR) module within the covisibility window, triggering frequent local optimization that stabilizes trajectories. Across standard SLAM benchmarks, VGGT-SLAM++ achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, substantially reducing short-term drift, accelerating graph convergence, and maintaining global consistency with compact DEM tiles and sublinear retrieval.

Avilasha Mandal, Rajesh Kumar, Sudarshan Sunil Harithas +1

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi · Addverb Technologies · Brown University

Visual SLAM Visual Odometry

Apr 5, 2026

DINO-VO: Learning Where to Focus for Enhanced State Estimation

We present DINO Patch Visual Odometry (DINO-VO), an end-to-end monocular visual odometry system with strong scene generalization. Current Visual Odometry (VO) systems often rely on heuristic feature extraction strategies, which can degrade accuracy and robustness, particularly in large-scale outdoor environments. DINO-VO addresses these limitations by incorporating a differentiable adaptive patch selector into the end-to-end pipeline, improving the quality of extracted patches and enhancing generalization across diverse datasets. Additionally, our system integrates a multi-task feature extraction module with a differentiable bundle adjustment (BA) module that leverages inverse depth priors, enabling the system to learn and utilize appearance and geometric information effectively. This integration bridges the gap between feature learning and state estimation. Extensive experiments on the TartanAir, KITTI, Euroc, and TUM datasets demonstrate that DINO-VO exhibits strong generalization across synthetic, indoor, and outdoor environments, achieving state-of-the-art tracking accuracy.

Qi Chen, Guanghao Li, Sijia Hu +4

Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute

Visual Odometry Feature Selection

Apr 3, 2026

ViBA: Implicit Bundle Adjustment with Geometric and Temporal Consistency for Robust Visual Matching

Most existing image keypoint detection and description methods rely on datasets with accurate pose and depth annotations, limiting scalability and generalization, and often degrading navigation and localization performance. We propose ViBA, a sustainable learning framework that integrates geometric optimization with feature learning for continuous online training on unconstrained video streams. Embedded in a standard visual odometry pipeline, it consists of an implicitly differentiable geometric residual framework: (i) an initial tracking network for inter-frame correspondences, (ii) depth-based outlier filtering, and (iii) differentiable global bundle adjustment that jointly refines camera poses and feature positions by minimizing reprojection errors. By combining geometric consistency from BA with long-term temporal consistency across frames, ViBA enforces stable and accurate feature representations. We evaluate ViBA on EuRoC and UMA datasets. Compared with state-of-the-art methods such as SuperPoint+SuperGlue, ALIKED, and LightGlue, ViBA reduces mean absolute translation error (ATE) by 12-18% and absolute rotation error (ARE) by 5-10% across sequences, while maintaining real-time inference speeds (FPS 36-91). When evaluated on unseen sequences, it retains over 90% localization accuracy, demonstrating robust generalization. These results show that ViBA supports continuous online learning with geometric and temporal consistency, consistently improving navigation and localization in real-world scenarios.

Xiaoji Niu, Yuqing Wang, Yan Wang +2

GNSS Research Center, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China · Electronic Information School, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China · Hubei Technology Innovation Center for Spatiotemporal Information and Positioning Navigation +1

Bundle Adjustment Visual Odometry Online Learning

Apr 2, 2026

HyVGGT-VO: Hybrid Dense Visual Odometry With Classical VO and Feed-Forward Model

Dense visual odometry (VO), which provides pose estimation and dense 3D reconstruction, serves as the cornerstone for applications ranging from robotics to augmented reality. Recently, feed-forward models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in dense mapping. However, when these models are used in dense visual SLAM systems, their keyframe-based processing often leads to sparse pose outputs, limiting continuous per-frame pose estimation. In contrast, traditional sparse methods provide high-frequency pose outputs but lack the capability for dense reconstruction. To address these limitations, we propose HyVGGT-VO, a novel framework that combines the computational efficiency of sparse VO with the dense reconstruction capabilities of feed-forward model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tightly couple a traditional VO frontend with VGGT. Specifically, we design an adaptive hybrid tracking frontend that dynamically switches between traditional optical flow and the VGGT model to ensure robustness. Furthermore, we introduce a hierarchical optimization framework that jointly refines VO poses and the scale of VGGT predictions to ensure global scale consistency. Under the odometry setting, compared with VGGT-SLAM 2.0, HyVGGT-VO reduces the average ATE by approximately 91% on EuRoC MAV and 20% on TUM RGB-D, and decreases the average relative translation and rotation errors by 46% and 92% on KITTI, respectively, while achieving 16.1 Hz pose output and 3.2 Hz dense-mapping updates with 6.5 GB of memory on an 8 GB laptop GPU.Our code is available at https://geneta2580.github.io/HyVGGT-VO.io.

Junxiang Pang, Lipu Zhou, Baojie Chen +1

The authors are with the School of Instrument Science and Opto-electronics Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

Visual Odometry Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction

Mar 23, 2026

Online Adaptation of Visual Odometry Frontends with Image-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Visual odometry (VO) frontends are typically tuned offline by domain experts on pre-recorded datasets and then deployed with fixed hyperparameters. Yet a configuration that performs best on a benchmark is not guaranteed to remain best when texture, illumination, motion blur, sensor noise, or computational conditions change at deployment. We propose a frontend that instead adapts its parameters automatically and continuously. We formulate frontend tuning as a sequential decision-making problem and introduce an image-conditioned reinforcement-learning policy that combines a lightweight embedding of the current image with a compact set of frontend statistics. At each decision step, the policy selects the FAST detection threshold, KLT patch size, and RANSAC rejection threshold; a privileged critic provides additional context only during training. Trained on synthetic TartanAirV2 data, the policy transfers zero-shot to a monocular-inertial OpenVINS pipeline on EuRoC, TUM-VI, and UZH-FPV. On synthetic test sequences, the learned policy improves the tracking-computation trade-off over an optimized static parameter configuration. On the three real-world benchmarks, it reduces mean ATE by up to 8% and runtime by up to 57% relative to static parameters baseline. These results show that image-conditioned online adaptation can improve the accuracy-computation trade-off beyond a single configuration selected offline.

Simone Nascivera, Leonard Bauersfeld, Jeff Delaune +1

Robotics and Perception Group, University of Zurich, Switzerland. · Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA.

Test-Time Adaptation Visual Odometry Visual-Inertial Odometry

Mar 20, 2026

Investigating a Policy-Based Formulation for Endoscopic Camera Pose Recovery

In endoscopic surgery, surgeons continuously locate the endoscopic view relative to the anatomy by interpreting the evolving visual appearance of the intraoperative scene in the context of their prior knowledge. Vision-based navigation systems seek to replicate this capability by recovering camera pose directly from endoscopic video, but most approaches do not embody the same principles of reasoning about new frames that makes surgeons successful. Instead, they remain grounded in feature matching and geometric optimization over keyframes, an approach that has been shown to degrade under the challenging conditions of endoscopic imaging like low texture and rapid illumination changes. Here, we pursue an alternative approach and investigate a policy-based formulation of endoscopic camera pose recovery that seeks to imitate experts in estimating trajectories conditioned on the previous camera state. Our approach directly predicts short-horizon relative motions without maintaining an explicit geometric representation at inference time. It thus addresses, by design, some of the notorious challenges of geometry-based approaches, such as brittle correspondence matching, instability in texture-sparse regions, and limited pose coverage due to reconstruction failure. We evaluate the proposed formulation on cadaveric sinus endoscopy. Under oracle state conditioning, we compare short-horizon motion prediction quality to geometric baselines achieving lowest mean translation error and competitive rotational accuracy. We analyze robustness by grouping prediction windows according to texture richness and illumination change indicating reduced sensitivity to low-texture conditions. These findings suggest that a learned motion policy offers a viable alternative formulation for endoscopic camera pose recovery.

Jan Emily Mangulabnan, Akshat Chauhan, Laura Fleig +7

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD 21218, USA · Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore MD 21218, USA

Camera Pose Estimation Visual Odometry Policy Learning Surgical Robotics

Mar 19, 2026

Benchmarking Visual Feature Representations for LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry Under Challenging Conditions

Accurate localization in autonomous driving is critical for successful missions including environmental mapping and survivor searches. In visually challenging environments, including low-light conditions, overexposure, illumination changes, and high parallax, the performance of conventional visual odometry methods significantly degrade undermining robust robotic navigation. Researchers have recently proposed LiDAR-inertial-visual odometry (LIVO) frameworks, that integrate LiDAR, IMU, and camera sensors, to address these challenges. This paper extends the FAST-LIVO2-based framework by introducing a hybrid approach that integrates direct photometric methods with descriptor-based feature matching. For the descriptor-based feature matching, this work proposes pairs of ORB with the Hamming distance, SuperPoint with SuperGlue, SuperPoint with LightGlue, and XFeat with the mutual nearest neighbor. The proposed configurations are benchmarked by accuracy, computational cost, and feature tracking stability, enabling a quantitative comparison of the adaptability and applicability of visual descriptors. The experimental results reveal that the proposed hybrid approach outperforms the conventional sparse-direct method. Although the sparse-direct method often fails to converge in regions where photometric inconsistency arises due to illumination changes, the proposed approach still maintains robust performance under the same conditions. Furthermore, the hybrid approach with learning-based descriptors enables robust and reliable visual state estimation across challenging environments.

Eunseon Choi, Junwoo Hong, Daehan Lee +9

Department of Covergence IT Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology(POSTECH), Pohang 37673, Republic of Korea · School of Mechanical Engineering, Kunsan National University, Jeonbuk 54150, Republic of Korea · Department of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Republic of Korea +2

Adaptive Lidar-Inertial Odometry Visual Odometry Visual-Inertial Odometry Robot Localization Local Feature Matching

Mar 17, 2026

Industrial cuVSLAM Benchmark & Integration

This work presents a comprehensive benchmark evaluation of visual odometry (VO) and visual SLAM (VSLAM) systems for mobile robot navigation in real-world logistical environments. We compare multiple visual odometry approaches across controlled trajectories covering translational, rotational, and mixed motion patterns, as well as a large-scale production facility dataset spanning approximately 1.7 km. Performance is evaluated using Absolute Pose Error (APE) against ground truth from a Vicon motion capture system and a LiDAR-based SLAM reference. Our results show that a hybrid stack combining the cuVSLAM front-end with a custom SLAM back-end achieves the strongest mapping accuracy, motivating a deeper integration of cuVSLAM as the core VO component in our robotics stack. We further validate this integration by deploying and testing the cuVSLAM-based VO stack on an NVIDIA Jetson platform.

Charbel Abi Hana, Kameel Amareen, Mohamad Mostafa +5

Idealworks · NVIDIA

Visual Odometry Visual SLAM Mobile Robotics

Mar 9, 2026

EndoSERV: A Vision-based Endoluminal Robot Navigation System

Robot-assisted endoluminal procedures are increasingly used for early cancer intervention. However, the intricate, narrow and tortuous pathways within the luminal anatomy pose substantial difficulties for robot navigation. Vision-based navigation offers a promising solution, but existing localization approaches are error-prone due to tissue deformation, in vivo artifacts and a lack of distinctive landmarks for consistent localization. This paper presents a novel EndoSERV localization method to address these challenges. It includes two main parts, i.e., SEgment-to-structure and Real-to-Virtual mapping, and hence the name. For long-range and complex luminal structures, we divide them into smaller sub-segments and estimate the odometry independently. To cater for label insufficiency, an efficient transfer technique maps real image features to the virtual domain to use virtual pose ground truth. The training phases of EndoSERV include an offline pretraining to extract texture-agnostic features, and an online phase that adapts to real-world conditions. Extensive experiments based on both public and clinical datasets have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method even without any real pose labels.

Junyang Wu, Fangfang Xie, Minghui Zhang +4

Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, 200240. · Shanghai Chest Hospital, Shanghai, China.

Robot Navigation Robot Localization Robotic Endoscopy Visual Odometry

Feb 26, 2026

FLIGHT: Fibonacci Lattice-based Inference for Geometric Heading in real-Time

Estimating camera motion from monocular video is a fundamental problem in computer vision, central to tasks such as SLAM, visual odometry, and structure-from-motion. Existing methods that recover the camera's heading under known rotation, whether from an IMU or an optimization algorithm, tend to perform well in low-noise, low-outlier conditions, but often decrease in accuracy or become computationally expensive as noise and outlier levels increase. To address these limitations, we propose a novel generalization of the Hough transform on the unit sphere (S(2)) to estimate the camera's heading. First, the method extracts correspondences between two frames and generates a great circle of directions compatible with each pair of correspondences. Then, by discretizing the unit sphere using a Fibonacci lattice as bin centers, each great circle casts votes for a range of directions, ensuring that features unaffected by noise or dynamic objects vote consistently for the correct motion direction. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is on the Pareto frontier of accuracy versus efficiency. Additionally, experiments on SLAM show that the proposed method reduces RMSE by correcting the heading during camera pose initialization.

David Dirnfeld, Fabien Delattre, Pedro Miraldo +1

University of Massachusetts Amherst · Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)

Camera Motion Understanding Camera Pose Estimation Relative Pose Estimation Visual Odometry

Feb 22, 2026

OpenVO: Open-World Visual Odometry with Temporal Dynamics Awareness

We introduce OpenVO, a novel framework for Open-world Visual Odometry (VO) with temporal awareness under limited input conditions. OpenVO effectively estimates real-world-scale ego-motion from monocular dashcam footage with varying observation rates and uncalibrated cameras, enabling robust trajectory dataset construction from rare driving events recorded in dashcam. Existing VO methods are trained on fixed observation frequency (e.g., 10Hz or 12Hz), completely overlooking temporal dynamics information. Many prior methods also require calibrated cameras with known intrinsic parameters. Consequently, their performance degrades when (1) deployed under unseen observation frequencies or (2) applied to uncalibrated cameras. These significantly limit their generalizability to many downstream tasks, such as extracting trajectories from dashcam footage. To address these challenges, OpenVO (1) explicitly encodes temporal dynamics information within a two-frame pose regression framework and (2) leverages 3D geometric priors derived from foundation models. We validate our method on three major autonomous-driving benchmarks - KITTI, nuScenes, and Argoverse 2 - achieving more than 20 performance improvement over state-of-the-art approaches. Under varying observation rate settings, our method is significantly more robust, achieving 46%-92% lower errors across all metrics. These results demonstrate the versatility of OpenVO for real-world 3D reconstruction and diverse downstream applications.

Phuc D. A. Nguyen, Anh N. Nhu, Ming C. Lin

University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Visual Odometry

Nov 12, 2025

SMF-VO: Direct Ego-Motion Estimation via Sparse Motion Fields

Traditional Visual Odometry (VO) and Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) methods rely on a 'pose-centric' paradigm, which computes absolute camera poses from the local map thus requires large-scale landmark maintenance and continuous map optimization. This approach is computationally expensive, limiting their real-time performance on resource-constrained devices. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Sparse Motion Field Visual Odometry (SMF-VO), a lightweight, 'motion-centric' framework. Our approach directly estimates instantaneous linear and angular velocity from sparse optical flow, bypassing the need for explicit pose estimation or expensive landmark tracking. We also employed a generalized 3D ray-based motion field formulation that works accurately with various camera models, including wide-field-of-view lenses. SMF-VO demonstrates superior efficiency and competitive accuracy on benchmark datasets, achieving over 100 FPS on a Raspberry Pi 5 using only a CPU. Our work establishes a scalable and efficient alternative to conventional methods, making it highly suitable for mobile robotics and wearable devices.

Sangheon Yang, Yeongin Yoon, Hong Mo Jung +1

Department of Artificial Intelligence, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea · All authors are with the Robot Vision Lab, Seoul National University.

Visual Odometry

Oct 2, 2025

Monocular Visual Odometry without Calibration or Test-time Optimization

The most accurate monocular visual odometry systems require known camera intrinsics, refine their estimates with test-time optimization, and recover trajectories only up to an unknown factor. Systems built on large 3D models need no intrinsics, but they remain considerably less accurate and slower for odometry. Direct pose regression avoids all these requirements, yet it has not matched either approach's accuracy. We revisit this formulation with a transformer that predicts relative camera poses together with separate rotation and translation confidences over overlapping image windows, supervised by camera poses alone. A confidence-weighted module then aggregates the overlapping predictions into a single trajectory. The resulting method, CalfVO, needs no intrinsics, no bundle adjustment, and no loop closure, and it recovers scale from learned priors, accurately enough that it is evaluated without any alignment to the ground truth. Across five benchmarks, it is the most accurate calibration-free method on every metric we report, and it runs at 53 FPS, faster than every baseline.

Vladimir Yugay, Duy-Kien Nguyen, Theo Gevers +2

University of Amsterdam

Relative Pose Estimation Camera Pose Estimation Visual Odometry

Sep 18, 2025

BEV-ODOM2: Enhanced BEV-based Monocular Visual Odometry with PV-BEV Fusion and Dense Flow Supervision for Ground Robots

Scale-consistent ego-motion estimation is fundamental for autonomous ground robots. Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation naturally addresses the scale drift problem of monocular visual odometry (MVO) by providing a metric-scaled planar workspace, enabling the simplification of 6-DoF ego-motion to a more robust 3-DoF model. However, existing BEV-based methods suffer from two key limitations: sparse supervision signals from pose-only training, and information loss during perspective-to-BEV projection. We present BEV-ODOM2, an enhanced framework in the BEV-ODOM line that addresses both limitations without supervision modalities beyond the pose ground truth. Our approach introduces (1) pose-derived dense rigid BEV flow supervision, which reparameterizes the 3-DoF pose ground truth into a pixel-level training signal, and (2) Perspective View (PV)-BEV fusion, which computes correlation volumes before projection to retain additional motion cues and help alleviate projection ambiguity. An enhanced rotation sampling strategy further balances diverse motion patterns during training. We evaluate on four datasets with varied spatial scales: KITTI, Oxford, NCLT, and our newly collected ZJH-VO benchmark. BEV-ODOM2 reduces the RTE of BEV-ODOM by 39% on average across the four datasets. It further enables closed-loop navigation on a physical robot with centimeter-level cross-track error. Real-time inference on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin confirms edge deployment feasibility. The code and the ZJH-VO dataset are publicly released to facilitate future research.

Yufei Wei, Chenxiao Hu, Wangtao Lu +5

Visual Odometry Bird's-Eye-View Representation