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Efficient and precise localization is a prerequisite for the intelligent navigation of mobile robots. Traditional visual localization systems, such as visual odometry (VO) and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), suffer from two shortcomings: a drift problem caused by accumulated localization error, and erroneous motion estimation due to illumination variation and moving objects. In this paper, we propose an enhanced VO by introducing a panoramic camera into the traditional stereo-only VO system. Benefiting from the 360° field of view, the panoramic camera is responsible for three tasks: (1) detecting road junctions and building a landmark library online; (2) correcting the robot’s position when the landmarks are revisited with any orientation; (3) working as a panoramic compass when the stereo VO cannot provide reliable positioning results. To use the large-sized panoramic images efficiently, the concept of compressed sensing is introduced into the solution and an adaptive compressive feature is presented. Combined with our previous two-stage local binocular bundle adjustment (TLBBA) stereo VO, the new system can obtain reliable positioning results in quasi-real time. Experimental results of challenging long-range tests show that our enhanced VO is much more accurate and robust than the traditional VO, thanks to the compressive panoramic landmarks built online.
Lü et al. (2015) studied this question.