  Unsupervised Learning based monocular visual odometry (VO) has lately drawn
significant attention for its potential in label-free leaning ability and
robustness to camera parameters and environmental variations. However,
partially due to the lack of drift correction technique, these methods are
still by far less accurate than geometric approaches for large-scale odometry
estimation. In this paper, we propose to leverage graph optimization and loop
closure detection to overcome limitations of unsupervised learning based
monocular visual odometry. To this end, we propose a hybrid VO system which
combines an unsupervised monocular VO called NeuralBundler with a pose graph
optimization back-end. NeuralBundler is a neural network architecture that uses
temporal and spatial photometric loss as main supervision and generates a
windowed pose graph consists of multi-view 6DoF constraints. We propose a novel
pose cycle consistency loss to relieve the tensions in the windowed pose graph,
leading to improved performance and robustness. In the back-end, a global pose
graph is built from local and loop 6DoF constraints estimated by NeuralBundler
and is optimized over SE(3). Empirical evaluation on the KITTI odometry dataset
demonstrates that 1) NeuralBundler achieves state-of-the-art performance on
unsupervised monocular VO estimation, and 2) our whole approach can achieve
efficient loop closing and show favorable overall translational accuracy
compared to established monocular SLAM systems.
