Abstract: This manuscript evaluates the usage of fused cross-spectral images in a monocular visual odometry approach. Fused images are obtained through a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) scheme, where the best setup is em- pirically obtained by means of a mutual information based evaluation met- ric. The objective is to have a exible scheme where fusion parameters are adapted according to the characteristics of the given images. Visual odom- etry is computed from the fused monocular images using an off the shelf approach. Experimental results using data sets obtained with two different platforms are presented. Additionally, comparison with a previous approach as well as with monocular-visible/infrared spectra are also provided showing the advantages of the proposed scheme.

Abstract: The simultaneous use of images from different spectra can be helpful to improve the performance of many com- puter vision tasks. The core idea behind the usage of cross- spectral approaches is to take advantage of the strengths of each spectral band providing a richer representation of a scene, which cannot be obtained with just images from one spectral band. In this work we tackle the cross-spectral image similarity problem by using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We explore three different CNN archi- tectures to compare the similarity of cross-spectral image patches. Specifically, we train each network with images from the visible and the near-infrared spectrum, and then test the result with two public cross-spectral datasets. Ex- perimental results show that CNN approaches outperform the current state-of-art on both cross-spectral datasets. Ad- ditionally, our experiments show that some CNN architec- tures are capable of generalizing between different cross- spectral domains.

Abstract: The manuscript evaluates the performance of a monocular visual odometry approach when images from different spectra are considered, both independently and fused. The objective behind this evaluation is to analyze if classical approaches can be improved when the given images, which are from different spectra, are fused and represented in new domains. The images in these new domains should have some of the following properties: i) more robust to noisy data; ii) less sensitive to changes (e.g., lighting); iii) more rich in descriptive information, among other. In particular in the current work two different image fusion strategies are considered. Firstly, images from the visible and thermal spectrum are fused using a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) approach. Secondly, a monochrome threshold strategy is considered. The obtained representations are evaluated under a visual odometry framework, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages, using different urban and semi-urban scenarios. Comparisons with both monocular-visible spectrum and monocular-infrared spectrum, are also provided showing the validity of the proposed approach.