Direct Stereo Visual Odometry based on Lines.

We propose a novel stereo visual odometry approach, which is especially suited for poorly textured environments.We introduce a novel, fast line segment detector and matcher, which detects vertical lines supportedby an IMU. The patches around lines are then used to directly estimate the pose of consecutive camerasby minimizing the photometric error. Our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in challengingenvironments. Our implementation runs in real-time and is therefore well suited for various robotics andaugmented reality applications.