Deep Visual Inertial-Aided Feature Extraction Network for Visual Odometry : Deep Neural Network training scheme to fuse visual and inertial information for feature extraction

Abstract: Feature extraction is an essential part of the Visual Odometry problem. In recent years, with the rise of Neural Networks, the problem has shifted from a more classical to a deep learning approach. This thesis presents a fine-tuned feature extraction network trained on pose estimation as a proxy task. The architecture aims at integrating inertial information coming from IMU sensor data in the deep local feature extraction paradigm. Specifically, visual features and inertial features are extracted using Neural Networks. These features are then fused together and further processed to regress the pose of a moving agent. The visual feature extraction network is effectively fine-tuned and is used stand-alone for inference. The approach is validated via a qualitative analysis on the keypoints extracted and also in a more quantitative way. Quantitatively, the feature extraction network is used to perform Visual Odometry on the Kitti dataset where the ATE for various sequences is reported. As a comparison, the proposed method, the proposed without IMU and the original pre-trained feature extraction network are used to extract features for the Visual Odometry task. Their ATE results and relative trajectories show that in sequences with great change in orientation the proposed system outperforms the original one, while on mostly straight sequences the original system performs slightly better.