Photometric Calibration for Stereo Camera with Gamma-like Response Function in Direct Visual Odometry

Direct visual odometry algorithms assume that every frame from the camera has the same photometric characteristics. However, the cameras with auto exposure are widely used outdoors as the environment often changes. The vignetting also affects the pixel’s brightness on different frames, even if the exposure time is fixed. We propose an online vignetting correction and exposure time estimation method for stereo direct visual odometry algorithms. Our method works on a camera that has a gamma-like response function. The inverse vignetting function and exposure time ratio between neighboring frames are estimated. Stereo matching is used to select correspondences between the left image and right image in the same frame at the initialization step. Feature points are used to pick the correspondences between different frames. Our method provides static correction results during the experiments on datasets and a stereo camera.