An Image Acquisition Scheme for Visual Odometry based on Image Bracketing and Online Attribute Control

Visual odometry (VO) system is challenged by complex illumination environments. Image quality and its consistency in the time domain directly determine feature detection and tracking performance, which further affect the robustness and accuracy of the entire system. In this paper, an image acquisition scheme with image bracketing patterns is proposed. Images with different exposure levels are continuously captured to sufficiently explore the scene under varying illumination. An attribute control method is designed to adjust image exposures within the brackets online. Gaussian process regression fits the relationship between image quality metric and exposure via image synthesis technique. The optimal exposures for the next bracket are obtained directly without attempts to ensure a quick response. Experiments show our acquisition system’s effectiveness and performance improvement for VO tasks in complex illumination scenes.