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Visual Odometry aims to estimate the relative motion of a camera, or of a stereo pair, by analyzing a sequence of images.
For a single camera, visual odometry can be addressed by computing the Essential Matrix and subsequently decomposing it. In this case, as noted above, the scale of the motion cannot be determined from monocular observations alone, but the different relative motions can be related to one another. For a stereo pair, knowledge of the calibration and baseline also makes it possible to determine the motion scale.
There are two main approaches to visual odometry. The first, known as 3D-to-3D, estimates motion from pairs of three-dimensional points reconstructed at successive instants. The second, known as 3D-to-2D, assumes that previously observed three-dimensional points are known and estimates the current pose by minimizing the corresponding reprojection error.