PALVO: visual odometry based on panoramic annular lens

Visual odometry has received a great deal of attention during the past decade. However, being fragile to rapid motion and dynamic scenarios prevents it from practical use. Here, we present PALVO by applying panoramic annular lens to visual odometry, greatly increasing the robustness to both cases. We modify the camera model for PAL and specially design the initialization process based on the essential matrix. Our method estimates the camera's poses through two-stage tracking, meanwhile builds the local map using a probabilistic mapping method based on the Bayesian framework and feature correspondence search along the epipolar curve. Several experiments are performed to verify our algorithm, demonstrating that our algorithm provides an extremely competitive performance in robustness to rapid motion and dynamic scenarios, meanwhile achieves the same level of accuracy as the state-of-the-art visual odometry.