Abstract
In this paper, we propose an active exposure control method to improve the robustness of visual odometry in HDR (high dynamic range) environments. Our method evaluates the proper exposure time by maximizing a robust gradient-based image quality metric. The optimization is achieved by exploiting the photometric response function of the camera. Our exposure control method is evaluated in different real world environments and outperforms both the built-in auto-exposure function of the camera and a fixed exposure time. To validate the benefit of our approach, we test different state-of-the-art visual odometry pipelines (namely, ORB-SLAM2, DSO, and SVO 2.0) and demonstrate significant improved performance using our exposure control method in very challenging HDR environments. Datasets and code will be released soon!
Zhang, Zichao