{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/self-supervised-geometry-guided","title":"Self-Supervised Geometry-Guided Initialization for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry","arxiv_id":"2406.00929","date":"2024-06-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Takayuki Kanai","Igor Vasiljevic","Vitor Guizilini","Kazuhiro Shintani"],"abstract":"Monocular visual odometry is a key technology in a wide variety of autonomous systems. Relative to traditional feature-based methods, that suffer from failures due to poor lighting, insufficient texture, large motions, etc., recent learning-based SLAM methods exploit iterative dense bundle adjustment to address such failure cases and achieve robust accurate localization in a wide variety of real environments, without depending on domain-specific training data. However, despite its potential, learning-based SLAM still struggles with scenarios involving large motion and object dynamics. In this paper, we diagnose key weaknesses in a popular learning-based SLAM model (DROID-SLAM) by analyzing major failure cases on outdoor benchmarks and exposing various shortcomings of its optimization process. We then propose the use of self-supervised priors leveraging a frozen large-scale pre-trained monocular depth estimation to initialize the dense bundle adjustment process, leading to robust visual odometry without the need to fine-tune the SLAM backbone. Despite its simplicity, our proposed method demonstrates significant improvements on KITTI odometry, as well as the challenging DDAD benchmark. Code and pre-trained models will be released upon publication.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00929v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.00929v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"self-supervised-geometry-guided","repo_url":"https://github.com/TRI-ML/vidar","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"NOASSERTION"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"depth-estimation","task_name":"Depth Estimation"},{"task_slug":"monocular-depth-estimation","task_name":"Monocular Depth Estimation"},{"task_slug":"monocular-visual-odometry","task_name":"Monocular Visual Odometry"},{"task_slug":"visual-odometry","task_name":"Visual Odometry"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2406.00929","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}