Feature-Based Correspondence Filtering Using Structural Similarity Index for Visual Odometry

The stereo correspondence problem is one of the most pre-eminent problems in a stereo vision system. With the right correspondence, a stereo vision system can help cap over diverse problems, while on the other hand, a wrong correspondence can be costly. While the performance of a feature-based correspondence approach is exceptional, the method can still produce wrong correspondences. This work presents an amalgam of feature-based and correlation-based correspondence, where the local pixels around a feature pair are compared using Structural SIMilarity index (SSIM), enhancing the correspondences, and a semantic-based filtering module, which further filters the obtained corresponding features using semantic data whenever detected in both the stereo image pair. While approaches in the literature are focused towards finding better features and their representation, the proposed approach advocates that correlation-based verification of the features can filter out bad correspondences, and in addition, aided by semantic-level filtering. These two modules establish the novelty of the work. The proposed correspondence matching algorithm is used to solve the problem of Visual Odometry to let a low-cost robot compute its pose in a novel environment. The experimental results show adequate filtering of wrong feature correspondence wherein, different environments with different lighting conditions were also considered. The proposed approach outperformed numerous state-of-the-art approaches available in the literature. The visual odometry algorithm using the proposed correspondence matching is compared against classical methods and a deep learning method, and it is observed that the proposed approach delivers lower trajectory error values in most scenarios on the KITTI dataset sequences.