Visual Odometry Drift Reduction Based on LiDAR Point Clouds Alignment

Visual and LiDAR based odometry methods are key enablers for autonomous robots sub-problems such as mapping and localization or temporal aggregation and fusion of sensor data. When it comes to trajectory reconstruction the errors of independent local estimations accumulate over time, resulting in overall drifts from the real trajectory. This paper proposes a method for reducing the global drift by correcting the video-based frame-to-frame trajectory estimation at selected points in time based on the alignment of past and current LiDAR 3D measurements. The main strength of the proposed method is the formulation of the problem as a system of linear equations, which is an adequate numerical approximation as the corrective component is small enough. In this way we eliminate the need to deploy expensive non-linear optimization methods for calculating the correction transform.