Feature tracking is the process of matching the same physical point across frames in a video sequence. This article organizes template tracking, Lucas–Kanade optical flow, descriptor matching, RANSAC, outlier rejection, and Kalman prediction with equations and implementation steps, and explains the conditions under which Visual Odometry and SLAM break down, along with mitigations.
September 3, 2026 Computer Vision PrimerVisual Odometry (VO) and Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) estimate the relative motion of a robot or camera from a sequence of images and inertial measurements. This article works through monocular scale ambiguity, IMU preintegration, initialization, filtering versus optimization, implementations such as VINS-Mono and OpenVINS, evaluation metrics, and failure conditions, with math and diagrams.