Dynamic Attention-based Visual Odometry

This paper proposes a dynamic attention-based visual odometry framework (DAVO), a learning-based VO method, for estimating the ego-motion of a monocular camera. DAVO dynamically adjusts the attention weights on different semantic categories for different motion scenarios based on optical flow maps. These weighted semantic categories can then be used to generate attention maps that highlight the relative importance of different semantic regions in input frames for pose estimation. In order to examine the proposed DAVO, we perform a number of experiments on the KITTI Visual Odometry and SLAM benchmark suite to quantitatively and qualitatively inspect the impacts of the dynamically adjusted weights on the accuracy of the evaluated trajectories. Moreover, we design a set of ablation analyses to justify each of our design choices, and validate the effectiveness as well as the advantages of DAVO. Our experiments on the KITTI dataset shows that the proposed DAVO framework does provide satisfactory performance in ego-motion estimation, and is able deliver competitive performance when compared to the contemporary VO methods.