Stereo visual odometry for pipe mapping

Pipe inspection is a critical activity in gas production facilities and many other industries. In this paper, we contribute a stereo visual odometry system for creating high resolution, sub-millimeter maps of pipe surfaces. Such maps provide both 3D structure and appearance information that can be used for visualization, cross registration with other sensor data, inspection and corrosion detection tasks. We present a range of optical configuration and visual odometry techniques that we use to achieve high accuracy while minimizing specular reflections. We show empirical results from a range of datasets to demonstrate the performance of our approach.