CNN-based Visual Ego-Motion Estimation for Fast MAV Maneuvers

In the field of visual ego-motion estimation for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs), fast maneuvers stay challenging mainly because of the big visual disparity and motion blur. In the pursuit of higher robustness, we study convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that predict the relative pose between subsequent images from a fast-moving monocular camera facing a planar scene. Aided by the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), we mainly focus on the translational motion. The networks we study have similar small model sizes (around 1.35MB) and high inference speeds (around 100Hz on a mobile GPU). Images for training and testing have realistic motion blur. Departing from a network framework that iteratively warps the first image to match the second with cascaded network blocks, we study different network architectures and training strategies. Simulated datasets and MAV flight datasets are used for evaluation. The proposed setup shows better accuracy over existing networks and traditional feature-point-based methods during fast maneuvers. Moreover, self-supervised learning outperforms supervised learning. The code developed for this paper will be open-source upon publication at https://github.com/tudelft/.