Good Line Cutting: towards Accurate Pose Tracking of Line-assisted VO/VSLAM

Yipu Zhao, Patricio A. Vela; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 516-531

This paper tackles a problem in line-assisted VO/VSLAM: accurately solving the least squares pose optimization with unreliable 3D line input. The solution we present is good line cutting, which extracts the most-informative sub-segment from each 3D line for use within the pose optimization formulation. By studying the impact of line cutting towards the information gain of pose estimation in line-based least squares problem, we demonstrate the applicability of improving pose estimation accuracy with good line cutting. To that end, we describe an efficient algorithm that approximately approaches the joint optimization problem of good line cutting. The proposed algorithm is integrated into a state-of-the-art line-assisted VSLAM system. When evaluated in two target scenarios of line-assisted VO/VSLAM, low-texture and motion blur, the accuracy of pose tracking is improved, while the robustness is preserved.