arXiv Computer Vision

NSFlow: End-to-End Differentiable Neuro-Symbolic Optical Flow for Visual Odometry

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

MDE-VIO: Enhancing Visual-Inertial Odometry Using Learned Depth Priors

MDE-VIO integrates learned depth priors into the VINS-Mono optimization backend to improve visual‑inertial odometry in low‑texture environments. The framework enforces affine‑invariant depth consistency and pairwise ordinal constraints while filtering unstable artifacts with variance‑based gating, keeping computation within edge‑device limits. Experiments on TartanGround and M3ED datasets show the method prevents divergence and reduces Absolute Trajectory Error by up to 28.3%.

By Arda Alniak, Sinan Kalkan, Mustafa Mert Ankarali, Afsar Saranli, Abdullah Aydin Alatan
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

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

The paper introduces a visual odometry frontend that automatically and continuously adapts its parameters using an image-conditioned reinforcement learning policy. The policy selects key tuning values—FAST detection threshold, KLT patch size, and RANSAC rejection threshold—based on a lightweight image embedding and frontend statistics, with a privileged critic aiding training. Trained on synthetic data, the approach transfers zero‑shot to real-world benchmarks, improving the tracking‑computation trade‑off by up to 8% in accuracy and 57% in runtime compared to static configurations.

By Simone Nascivera, Leonard Bauersfeld, Jeff Delaune, Davide Scaramuzza
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

SFVO: Decoupled Confidence-Guided Stereo-Flow Visual Odometry with Bidirectional PnP

SFVO is a stereo visual‑odometry framework that leverages pretrained stereo‑matching and optical‑flow models to obtain dense stereo and temporal correspondences. Rather than learning pose directly from images, it maps these correspondences into geometric constraints and predicts trustworthy points using decoupled confidence maps for rotation and translation. Experiments on both outdoor and indoor datasets show that SFVO delivers robust, accurate pose estimation with strong generalization, and the authors plan to release the code.

By Kai Zhang, Guoyang Zhao, Jun Ma
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Minimalist Visual Inertial Odometry

The paper introduces a minimalist visual-inertial odometry system that uses only four downward-facing photodiodes with optical Gabor masks and an IMU to estimate motion for differential-drive robots. By jointly optimizing mask parameters and a Temporal Convolutional Network in a physically-grounded simulator, the model decodes speed from the photodiode signals and combines it with IMU angular speed to produce a continuous planar trajectory. Experiments on a prototype robot across indoor and outdoor terrains show that the system closely follows reference trajectories without real-world fine-tuning.

By Francesco Pasti, Jeremy Klotz, Nicola Bellotto, Shree K. Nayar
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Object Concepts Emerge from Motion

The paper introduces a biologically inspired framework that learns object‑centric visual representations from raw videos without human annotations or camera calibration. By using motion boundaries detected via optical flow and clustering to create pseudo‑instance masks, the method supervises a single‑image encoder with pixel‑level pairwise metric learning. Training on 195 million pseudo‑labeled frames and expanding to 421 million frames through Motion‑Verified Self‑Training, the approach yields Swin‑based encoders that outperform or match supervised and self‑supervised baselines on tasks such as monocular depth estimation, 3D object detection, 3D occupancy prediction, and end‑to‑end planning.

By Boshi Li, Xiaohui Wang, Xiaoyang Wu, Zhichao Li, Ya Yang, Naiyan Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 7

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

Con-DSO introduces a consistency-aware RGB‑D direct sparse odometry framework that learns pixel‑level photometric and geometric uncertainty from adjacent RGB‑D frame pairs. The network predicts uncertainties that are converted into pairwise quality scores, guiding support‑pixel selection and forming a host‑side quality prior for keyframe tracking. Experiments on five public benchmarks show that this approach reduces absolute trajectory error by over 20% on ICL‑NUIM and by 50–80% on other datasets, improving robustness in challenging environments.

By Haolan Zhang, Thanh Nguyen Canh, Chenghao Li, Ziyan Gao, Xiongwen Jiang, Nak Young Chong
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

End-to-End Visual Odometry with RNNs and Attention

The paper "End-to-End Visual Odometry with RNNs and Attention" presents a study of deep‑learning approaches to visual odometry (VO), proposing a novel temporal attention‑based model to enhance performance. It evaluates existing end‑to‑end VO methods and explores their effectiveness on hand‑held camera data, contrasting with the typical driving‑scene training sets. The work aims to improve VO accuracy in more dynamic and complex visual environments.

By Ruiyu Li, Yinjia Liu, Alexander Yu
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

HENet++: Hybrid Encoding and Multi-task Learning for 3D Perception and End-to-end Autonomous Driving

HENet++ is a unified framework that combines a hybrid image encoding strategy—using a large encoder for short‑term frames and a lightweight encoder for long‑term temporal context—to balance accuracy and efficiency in 3D perception for autonomous driving. It jointly extracts dense background and sparse foreground features, enabling task‑specific representations that reduce cumulative errors and enrich downstream prediction and planning modules. The approach supports diverse 3D feature extraction pipelines, multi‑modal inputs (camera and radar), and achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on nuScenes and NAVSIM benchmarks, including the lowest collision rate on nuScenes planning.

By Zhongyu Xia, Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

FFVO: A Feedforward Pose Decoder for Long-Horizon Visual Odometry

arXiv:2609.13733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stable and reliable 4D spatial understanding is fundamental for autonomous driving systems. While feedforward reconstruction networks can estimate came...

By Meng-Li Shih, Shih-Yang Su, Yuliang Zou, Hao Xiang, Haidong Zhu, Vincent Casser, Brian Curless, Dmitry Kalenichenko, Mingxing Tan, Dragomir Anguelov
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Refining Ground Truth Poses in Autonomous Driving Datasets via Neural Rendering

arXiv:2504.15776v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Public autonomous driving datasets underpin the training and benchmarking of perception, mapping, and localization algorithms, yet residual inaccur...

By Quentin Herau, Nathan Piasco, Moussab Bennehar, Luis Rold\~ao, Dzmitry Tsishkou, Bingbing Liu, Cyrille Migniot, Pascal Vasseur, C\'edric Demonceaux