High-Precision Camera Localization in Scenes with Repetitive Patterns

This article presents a high-precision multi-modal approach for localizing moving cameras with monocular videos, which has wide potentials in many intelligent applications, including robotics, autonomous vehicles, and so on. Existing visual odometry methods often suffer from symmetric or repetitive scene patterns, e.g., windows on buildings or parking stalls. To address this issue, we introduce a robust camera localization method that contributes in two aspects. First, we formulate feature tracking, the critical step of visual odometry, as a hierarchical min-cost network flow optimization task, and we regularize the formula with flow constraints, cross-scale consistencies, and motion heuristics. The proposed regularized formula is capable of adaptively selecting distinctive features or feature combinations, which is more effective than traditional methods that detect and group repetitive patterns in a separate step. Second, we develop a joint formula for integrating dense visual odometry and sparse GPS readings in a common reference coordinate. The fusion process is guided with high-order statistics knowledge to suppress the impacts of noises, clusters, and model drifting. We evaluate the proposed camera localization method on both public video datasets and a newly created dataset that includes scenes full of repetitive patterns. Results with comparisons show that our method can achieve comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods and is particularly effective for addressing repetitive pattern issues.