Spatiotemporal Dual-Stream Network for Visual Odometry

Visual Odometry (VO) empowers robots with the ability to perform self-localization within unknown environments using visual cues, yet it is faced with challenges in dynamic environments. In this study, we propose a novel monocular visual odometry network called Spatiotemporal Dual-stream Network (STDN-VO) with two parallel streams, i.e. spatial stream and temporal stream, to model spatiotemporal correlation in the image sequences. Technically, the spatial stream is responsible for extracting global context information from an image, while the temporal stream is designed to effectively extract robust temporal context information from consecutive frames. The outputs of the spatial stream and the temporal stream are merged and then fed to a pose head for predicting the relative pose. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate competitive pose estimation performance exceeding published deep learning-based methods. These results underscore the effectiveness of the proposed framework for visual odometry.