An examination of feature detection for real-time visual odometry in untextured natural terrain

Estimating the position of a robot is an essential requirement for autonomous mobile robots. Visual Odometry is a promising localization method in slippery natural terrain, which drastically degrades the accuracy of Wheel Odometry, while relying neither on other infrastructure nor any prior knowledge. Visual Odometry, however, suffers from the instability of feature extraction from the untextured natural terrain. To date, a number of feature detectors have been proposed for stable feature detection. This paper compares commonly used detectors in terms of robustness, localization accuracy and computational efficiency, and points out their trade-off problems among those criteria. To solve the problem, a hybrid algorithm is proposed which dynamically switches between multiple detectors according to the texture of terrain. Validity of the algorithm is proved by the simulation using dataset at volcanic areas in Japan.