# Learning Generalized Visual Odometry Using Position-Aware Optical Flow and Geometric Bundle Adjustment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.11141 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11141/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02565/) (2016)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [GeoNet: Unsupervised Learning of Dense Depth, Optical Flow and Camera Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02276/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth and Ego-motion Learning from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10553/) (2019)
- [Competitive Collaboration: Joint Unsupervised Learning of Depth, Camera Motion, Optical Flow and Motion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09806/) (2018)
- [D3VO: Deep Depth, Deep Pose and Deep Uncertainty for Monocular Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01060/) (2020)
- [UnFlow: Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow with a Bidirectional Census Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07837/) (2017)
- [DeepVO: Towards End-to-End Visual Odometry with Deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08429/) (2017)
- [BA-Net: Dense Bundle Adjustment Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04807/) (2018)
- [DF-Net: Unsupervised Joint Learning of Depth and Flow using Cross-Task Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01649/) (2018)
- [SelFlow: Self-Supervised Learning of Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09117/) (2019)
- [Occlusion Aware Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05890/) (2017)
- [Every Pixel Counts ++: Joint Learning of Geometry and Motion with 3D Holistic Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06125/) (2018)
- [Towards Better Generalization: Joint Depth-Pose Learning without PoseNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01314/) (2020)
- [Visual Odometry Revisited: What Should Be Learnt?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09803/) (2019)
- [Forget About the LiDAR: Self-Supervised Depth Estimators with MED Probability Volumes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03633/) (2020)
- [Learning Monocular Visual Odometry via Self-Supervised Long-Term Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10983/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Deep Visual Odometry with Online Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06136/) (2020)
- [An Efficient Algebraic Solution to the Perspective-Three-Point Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08237/) (2017)
- [MSC-VO: Exploiting Manhattan and Structural Constraints for Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03408/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [iSLAM: Imperative SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07894/) (2023)
- [Vector-Symbolic Architecture for Event-Based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08300/) (2024)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR for Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01567/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Visual Odometry and Action Integration for PointGoal Navigation in Indoor Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00413/) (2022)
- [Toward Better SSIM Loss for Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04758/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent visual odometry (VO) methods incorporating geometric algorithm into deep-learning architecture have shown outstanding performance on the challenging monocular VO task. Despite encouraging results are shown, previous methods ignore the requirement of generalization capability under noisy environment and various scenes. To address this challenging issue, this work first proposes a novel optical flow network (PANet). Compared with previous methods that predict optical flow as a direct regression task, our PANet computes optical flow by predicting it into the discrete position space with optical flow probability volume, and then converting it to optical flow. Next, we improve the bundle adjustment module to fit the self-supervised training pipeline by introducing multiple sampling, ego-motion initialization, dynamic damping factor adjustment, and Jacobi matrix weighting. In addition, a novel normalized photometric loss function is advanced to improve the depth estimation accuracy. The experiments show that the proposed system not only achieves comparable performance with other state-of-the-art self-supervised learning-based methods on the KITTI dataset, but also significantly improves the generalization capability compared with geometry-based, learning-based and hybrid VO systems on the noisy KITTI and the challenging outdoor (KAIST) scenes.