MOP-SLAM: A real time SLAM system based on multi-head optical flow estimation network

SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) is becoming a significant technology in driverless vehicles nowadays. Sometimes the optical flow method can be used to track feature points to reduce the amount of calculation. But the traditional optical flow method is based on the assumption that the luminosity will not change and has high requirements for the environment. Therefore, an optical flow calculation method based on neural network called Optical-Net is proposed in this paper to match and track feature and corner points. We use the multi-head attention module to extract and fuse the features of different scales. The training results show that the Optical-Net designed in this study effectively improves the robustness and accuracy of optical flow estimation when the object has large displacement and small displacement. Meanwhile, to address the problem of reduced matching accuracy during video input due to dynamic blurring, a video dynamic deblurring algorithm based on the one-dimensional Wineman filter is adopted to preprocess the input video. Finally, we replaced the tracking thread in traditional SLAM. The performance of the improved algorithm is verified by experiments on our own driverless car.