Minimizing Image Reprojection Error For Relative Scale Estimation In Visual Odometry

In this paper we address the problem of visual motion estimation (visual odometry) from a single vehicle mounted camera. One of the basic issues of visual odometry is relative scale estimation. We propose a method to compute locally optimal relative scales by minimizing the reprojection error using windowed bundle adjustment. We introduce a minimal parameterization of the bundle adjustment problem to get an efficient optimization procedure. We will present experimental results for scale estimation on challenging image data acquired by an onmidirectional camera mounted on a vehicle. The experiments show the high local accuracy of the scale and the robustness of the algorithm over long distances (∼1000m).