Covariance estimation for the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) point cloud registration algorithm is essential for state estimation and sensor fusion purposes. We argue that a major source of error for ICP is in the input data itself, from the sensor noise to the scene geometry. Benefiting from recent developments in deep learning for point clouds, we propose a data-driven approach to learn an error model for ICP. We estimate covariances modeling data-dependent heteroscedastic aleatoric uncertainty, and epistemic uncertainty using a variational Bayesian approach. The system evaluation is performed on LiDAR odometry on different datasets, highlighting good results in comparison to the state of the art.

Uncertainty estimation of visual feature is essential for vision-based systems, such as visual navigation. We show that errors inherent to visual tracking, in particular using KLT tracker, can be learned using a probabilistic loss function to estimate the covariance matrix on each tracked feature position. The proposed system is trained and evaluated on synthetic data, as well as on real data, highlighting good results in comparison to the state of the art. The benefits of the tracking uncertainty estimates are illustrated for visual motion estimation.