RPNet: an End-to-End Network for Relative Camera Pose Estimation

This paper addresses the task of relative camera pose estimation from raw image pixels, by means of deep neural networks. The proposed RPNet network takes pairs of images as input and directly infers the relative poses, without the need of camera intrinsic/extrinsic. While state-of-the-art systems based on SIFT + RANSAC, are able to recover the translation vector only up to scale, RPNet is trained to produce the full translation vector, in an end-to-end way. Experimental results on the Cambridge Landmark dataset show very promising results regarding the recovery of the full translation vector. They also show that RPNet produces more accurate and more stable results than traditional approaches, especially for hard images (repetitive textures, textureless images, etc). To the best of our knowledge, RPNet is the first attempt to recover full translation vectors in relative pose estimation

DPC-Net: Deep Pose Correction for Visual Localization

We present a novel method to fuse the power of deep networks with the computational efficiency of geometric and probabilistic localization algorithms. In contrast to other methods that completely replace a classical visual estimator with a deep network, we propose an approach that uses a convolutional neural network to learn difficult-to-model corrections to the estimator from ground-truth training data. To this end, we derive a novel loss function for learning SE(3) corrections based on a matrix Lie groups approach, with a natural formulation for balancing translation and rotation errors. We use this loss to train a Deep Pose Correction network (DPC-Net) that predicts corrections for a particular estimator, sensor and environment. Using the KITTI odometry dataset, we demonstrate significant improvements to the accuracy of a computationally-efficient sparse stereo visual odometry pipeline, that render it as accurate as a modern computationally-intensive dense estimator. Further, we show how DPC-Net can be used to mitigate the effect of poorly calibrated lens distortion parameters.Comment: In IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'18), Brisbane, Australia, May 21-25, 201