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ICRA 2009

A visual odometry framework robust to motion blur

Conference Paper Visual Navigation - I Artificial Intelligence ยท Robotics

Abstract

Motion blur is a severe problem in images grabbed by legged robots and, in particular, by small humanoid robots. Standard feature extraction and tracking approaches typically fail when applied to sequences of images strongly affected by motion blur. In this paper, we propose a new feature detection and tracking scheme that is robust even to non-uniform motion blur. Furthermore, we developed a framework for visual odometry based on features extracted out of and matched in monocular image sequences. To reliably extract and track the features, we estimate the point spread function (PSF) of the motion blur individually for image patches obtained via a clustering technique and only consider highly distinctive features during matching. We present experiments performed on standard datasets corrupted with motion blur and on images taken by a camera mounted on walking small humanoid robots to show the effectiveness of our approach. The experiments demonstrate that our technique is able to reliably extract and match features and that it is furthermore able to generate a correct visual odometry, even in presence of strong motion blur effects and without the aid of any inertial measurement sensor.

Authors

Keywords

  • Robustness
  • Humanoid robots
  • Feature extraction
  • Tracking
  • Legged locomotion
  • Computer vision
  • Motion detection
  • Image sequences
  • Motion estimation
  • Robot vision systems
  • Motion Blur
  • Visual Framework
  • Visual Odometry
  • Walking
  • Feature Detection
  • Inertial Measurement Unit
  • Point Spread Function
  • Standard Datasets
  • Feature Matching
  • Feature Tracking
  • Humanoid Robot
  • Small Robot
  • Blur Effect
  • Histogram
  • Local Maxima
  • Gaussian Filter
  • Affine Transformation
  • Image Point
  • Cluster Centroids
  • Scale-invariant Feature Transform
  • Speeded Up Robust Features
  • Blurred Images
  • Invariant Features
  • Camera Motion
  • Scene Point
  • Wiener Filter
  • Inliers
  • Bundle Adjustment

Context

Venue
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Archive span
1984-2025
Indexed papers
30179
Paper id
92547642763791745
v2026.09.13