Visual Odometry Using Non-Overlapping RGB-D Cameras

In this paper, a method to achieve visual odometry by two RGB-D cameras is proposed. The two cameras are placed to face in opposite directions. We adopt a novel method to obtain the position and attitude relationship between the front and rear camera coordinate systems, which uses a motion capture system and 2-dimensional bar code. Additionally, for the data observed by different cameras, a tightly coupled scheme is adopted for data fusion, and the feasibility of the algorithm is verified. At last, we achieve visual odometry by two non-overlapping RGB-D cameras. The average error is near 2.5 mm for the entire recorded image dataset while the average displacement is 40.61 mm. The result shows that the designed visual odometry is more robust and accurate than the visual odometry of a single camera.