Straight-line constrained optical flow monocular visual odometry

A monocular visual odometry using straight-line constrained optical flow was proposed to estimate the robotic ego-motion. The straight-line constrained optical flow was defined by decomposing the motion of a line segment in image plane into a rotation and two directional translations. The parameters of optical flow are similar to robot motion, so we can estimate the motion by combining the camera model separately. The estimation of straight line constraint optical flow is much faster than traditional optical flow methods and avoids resolving a nonlinear problem. Experimental results validated the efficiency of our method.