VONAS: Network Design in Visual Odometry using Neural Architecture Search

The end-to-end VO (visual odometry) is a complicated task with the property of highly temporal dependency, but the design of its deep networks lacks thorough investigation. Meanwhile, NAS (Neural architecture search) has been widely searched and applied in many computer vision fields due to its advantage in automatic network design. However, most of the existing NAS frameworks only consider single image tasks such as image classification, lacking the consideration of the video (multi-frames) tasks such as VO. Therefore, this paper explores the network design for the VO task and proposes a more general single path based one-shot NAS, named VONAS, which can model sequential information for video-related tasks. Extensive experiments prove that the network architecture is significant for the (un)supervised VO. The models obtained by VONAS are lightweight and achieve SOTA performance with good generalization.