DytanVO: Joint Refinement of Visual Odometry and Motion Segmentation in Dynamic Environments

Learning-based visual odometry (VO) algorithms achieve remarkable performance on common static scenes, benefiting from high-capacity models and massive annotated data, but tend to fail in dynamic, populated environments. Semantic segmentation is largely used to discard dynamic associations before estimating camera motions but at the cost of discarding static features and is hard to scale up to unseen categories. In this paper, we leverage the mutual dependence between camera ego-motion and motion segmentation and show that both can be jointly refined in a single learning-based framework. In particular, we present DytanVO, the first supervised learning-based VO method that deals with dynamic environments. It takes two consecutive monocular frames in real-time and predicts camera ego-motion in an iterative fashion. Our method achieves an average improvement of 27.7% in ATE over state-of-the-art VO solutions in real-world dynamic environments, and even performs competitively among dynamic visual SLAM systems which optimize the trajectory on the backend. Experiments on plentiful unseen environments also demonstrate our method's generalizability.

Dynamic Dense RGB-D SLAM using Learning-based Visual Odometry

We propose a dense dynamic RGB-D SLAM pipeline based on a learning-based visual odometry, TartanVO. TartanVO, like other direct methods rather than feature-based, estimates camera pose through dense optical flow, which only applies to static scenes and disregards dynamic objects. Due to the color constancy assumption, optical flow is not able to differentiate between dynamic and static pixels. Therefore, to reconstruct a static map through such direct methods, our pipeline resolves dynamic/static segmentation by leveraging the optical flow output, and only fuse static points into the map. Moreover, we rerender the input frames such that the dynamic pixels are removed and iteratively pass them back into the visual odometry to refine the pose estimate.