Fast-MbyM: leveraging translational invariance of the fourier transform for efficient and accurate radar odometry

Conference item

Masking by Moving (MByM), provides robust and accurate radar odometry measurements through an exhaustive correlative search across discretised pose candidates. However, this dense search creates a significant computational bottleneck which hinders real-time performance when high-end GPUs are not available. Utilising the translational invariance of the Fourier Transform, in our approach, Fast Masking by Moving (f-MByM), we decouple the search for angle and translation. By maintaining end-to-end differentiability a neural network is used to mask scans and trained by supervising pose prediction directly. Training faster and with less memory, utilising a decoupled search allows f-MbyM to achieve significant run-time performance improvements on a CPU (168 %) and to run in real-time on embedded devices, in stark contrast to MbyM. Throughout, our approach remains accurate and competitive with the best radar odometry variants available in the literature – achieving an end-point drift of 2.01 % in translation and 6.3 deg /km on the Oxford Radar RobotCar Dataset.

Authors: Weston, R; Gadd, M; De Martini, D; Newman, P; Posner, H

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IEEE
• Host title: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2022)
• Pages: 2186-2192
• Publication date: 2022-07-12
• Acceptance date: 2022-02-28
• Event title: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2022)
• Event location: Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Event website: https://www.icra2022.org/
• Event start date: 2022-05-23
• Event end date: 2022-05-27
• DOI: 10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9812063
• EISBN: 978-1-7281-9681-7
• ISBN: 978-1-7281-9682-4
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR