SFVO: Decoupled Confidence-Guided Stereo-Flow Visual Odometry with Bidirectional PnP
Kai Zhang, Guoyang Zhao, Jun Ma
Abstract
Deep learning-based visual odometry (VO) has achieved significant progress, yet most existing methods focus on a monocular approach, which suffers from scale ambiguity. Stereo VO provides real metric by its nature, but remains less studied in deep learning VO due to its high computational cost and modeling complexity. Recent advances in stereo matching and optical flow estimation have made dense visual correspondence increasingly accurate and reliable, but their complementary geometric information has not been fully exploited for VO. In this paper, we present SFVO, a correspondence-driven stereo VO framework that directly builds upon pretrained stereo matching and optical flow models. SFVO exploits pretrained stereo matching and optical flow models to estimate stereo and temporal correspondences. Instead of learning pose directly from images, SFVO maps learned correspondences into geometric constraints and predicts which points are trustworthy. To improve the reliability of visual correspondence-based geometric constraints, we introduce decoupled confidence maps for rotation and translation. This design better aligns the characteristics of visual correspondence and 6-DoF transformations. Extensive experiments on outdoor and indoor datasets demonstrate that SFVO achieves robust and accurate pose estimation with strong generalization capability. The code will be released.