# CoProU-VO: Combining Projected Uncertainty for End-to-End Unsupervised Monocular Visual Odometry

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00568 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00568/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03825/) (2024)
- [GeoNet: Unsupervised Learning of Dense Depth, Optical Flow and Camera Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02276/) (2018)
- [D3VO: Deep Depth, Deep Pose and Deep Uncertainty for Monocular Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01060/) (2020)
- [On the uncertainty of self-supervised monocular depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06209/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Monocular Depth Estimation and Visual Odometry with Deep Feature Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03893/) (2018)
- [Uncertainty Estimates and Multi-Hypotheses Networks for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07095/) (2018)
- [Deep Virtual Stereo Odometry: Leveraging Deep Depth Prediction for Monocular Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02570/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11610/) (2021)
- [Visual Odometry Revisited: What Should Be Learnt?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09803/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [PoseFM: Relative Camera Pose Estimation Through Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22350/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual Odometry (VO) is fundamental to autonomous navigation, robotics, and augmented reality, with unsupervised approaches eliminating the need for expensive ground-truth labels. However, these methods struggle when dynamic objects violate the static scene assumption, leading to erroneous pose estimations. We tackle this problem by uncertainty modeling, which is a commonly used technique that creates robust masks to filter out dynamic objects and occlusions without requiring explicit motion segmentation. Traditional uncertainty modeling considers only single-frame information, overlooking the uncertainties across consecutive frames. Our key insight is that uncertainty must be propagated and combined across temporal frames to effectively identify unreliable regions, particularly in dynamic scenes. To address this challenge, we introduce Combined Projected Uncertainty VO (CoProU-VO), a novel end-to-end approach that combines target frame uncertainty with projected reference frame uncertainty using a principled probabilistic formulation. Built upon vision transformer backbones, our model simultaneously learns depth, uncertainty estimation, and camera poses. Consequently, experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets demonstrate significant improvements over previous unsupervised monocular end-to-end two-frame-based methods and exhibit strong performance in challenging highway scenes where other approaches often fail. Additionally, comprehensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of cross-frame uncertainty propagation.