Modality-Invariant Visual Odometry for Embodied Vision
Authors: Marius Memmel, Roman Bachmann, Amir Zamir

Effectively localizing an agent in a realistic, noisy setting is crucial for many embodied vision tasks. Visual Odometry (VO) is a practical substitute for unreliable GPS and compass sensors, especially in indoor environments. While SLAM-based methods show a solid performance without large data requirements, they are less flexible and robust w.r.t. to noise and changes in the sensor suite compared to learning-based approaches. Recent deep VO models, however, limit themselves to a fixed set of input modalities, e.g., RGB and depth, while training on millions of samples. When sensors fail, sensor suites change, or modalities are intentionally looped out due to available resources, e.g., power consumption, the models fail catastrophically. Furthermore, training these models from scratch is even more expensive without simulator access or suitable existing models that can be fine-tuned. While such scenarios get mostly ignored in simulation, they commonly hinder a model's reusability in real-world applications. We propose a Transformer-based modality-invariant VO approach that can deal with diverse or changing sensor suites of navigation agents. Our model outperforms previous methods while training on only a fraction of the data. We hope this method opens the door to a broader range of real-world applications that can benefit from flexible and learned VO models.