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.
@article{arxiv.2109.14828,
title = {Uncertainty Estimation of Dense Optical-Flow for Robust Visual Navigation},
author = {Yonhon Ng and Hongdong Li and Jonghyuk Kim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.14828},
year = {2021}
}