The present paper reviews the classical problem of free-form curve registration and applies it to an efficient RGBD visual odometry system called Canny-VO, as it efficiently tracks all Canny edge features extracted from the images. Two replacements for the distance transformation commonly used in edge registration are proposed: Approximate Nearest Neighbour Fields and Oriented Nearest Neighbour Fields. 3D2D edge alignment benefits from these alternative formulations in terms of both efficiency and accuracy. It removes the need for the more computationally demanding paradigms of datato-model registration, bilinear interpolation, and sub-gradient computation. To ensure robustness of the system in the presence of outliers and sensor noise, the registration is formulated as a maximum a posteriori problem, and the resulting weighted least squares objective is solved by the iteratively re-weighted least squares method. A variety of robust weight functions are investigated and the optimal choice is made based on the statistics of the residual errors. Efficiency is furthermore boosted by an adaptively sampled definition of the nearest neighbour fields. Extensive evaluations on public SLAM benchmark sequences demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and an advantage over classical Euclidean distance fields.
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