DynaNav-SVO: Dynamic Stereo Visual Odometry With Semantic-Aware Perception for Autonomous Navigation

Conventional visual navigation methods presume scene stability and encounter challenges due to moving objects in highly dynamic environments. We propose DynaNav-SVO, a stereo visual odometry (VO) framework, which semantically detects and constructs a region-of-interest (ROI) by focusing on
a-priori
urban fixed elements for reliable feature extraction and subsequently estimates vehicle pose. The outcome is a static map with minimal outliers and is used for state estimation in dynamic scenes and perceptually degraded conditions. This map enhances computational efficiency due to the reduced size of the new static mask (as confirmed in several experiments), compared to the existing visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) solutions. To refine the estimated pose, a back-end module selects a moving horizon of frames, generates a covisibility graph for data association, and optimizes a structure-from-motion program using local bundle adjustment. Finally, the performance of the framework is experimentally evaluated using a test vehicle in highly-dynamic urban settings and under adverse weather conditions with degraded visual perception with varying sequence lengths. The experiments confirm excellent performance in terms of estimation accuracy and computational efficiency for autonomous navigation compared to existing vSLAM methods.