Stereo Odometry – A Review of Approaches

Estimating its ego-motion is one of the most important capabilities for an autonomous mobile platform. Without reliable ego-motion estimation no long-term navigation is possible. Besides odometry, inertial sensors, DGPS, laser range finders and so on, vision based algorithms can contribute a lot of information. Stereo odometry is a vision based motion estimation algorithm that estimates the ego-motion of a stereo camera through its environment by evaluating the captured images. In this paper, we want to give an integrated overview of stereo odometry and the accompanying literature. We want to emphasize the fact that stereo odometry is a chain of several single subprocesses where each relies on its predecessor’s results. A variety of exchangable methods for each of these subprocesses is available. The key to a more accurate and efficient stereo odometry lies in an integrated analysis of its single subprocesses and the many algorithms available.