PLVO: Plane-line-based RGB-D Visual Odometry

A plane-line-based RGB-D visual odometry (PLVO) is proposed to solve the degenerate problem in the pose estimation of an RGB-D camera using plane features. First, the plane-line hybrid association graph (PLHAG) is proposed to associate two types of geometric features. Planes and lines are associated in an integrated framework, which fully exploits the geometric relationships between two planes and between a plane and a line, respectively. Then, the pose of an RGB-D camera is estimated based on the adaptive fusion of planes and lines. Generally speaking, the plane features are more accurately and stably extracted than the line features. As a result, in our method, the planes dominate the calculation of the camera pose through an adaptive weighting algorithm. As for the degrees of freedom (DoFs) of the pose that cannot be constrained by planes, the line features are supplementarily used to obtain the full 6 DoF pose estimation of the camera. Thus, the fusion of two types of features is achieved and the degenerate problem using only plane features is solved. Various experiments on public benchmarks as well as in real-world environments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. © 2023 Science Press. All rights reserved.