No Arabic abstract
We present HybVIO, a novel hybrid approach for combining filtering-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO) with optimization-based SLAM. The core of our method is highly robust, independent VIO with improved IMU bias modeling, outlier rejection, stationarity detection, and feature track selection, which is adjustable to run on embedded hardware. Long-term consistency is achieved with a loosely-coupled SLAM module. In academic benchmarks, our solution yields excellent performance in all categories, especially in the real-time use case, where we outperform the current state-of-the-art. We also demonstrate the feasibility of VIO for vehicular tracking on consumer-grade hardware using a custom dataset, and show good performance in comparison to current commercial VISLAM alternatives.
Visual odometry shows excellent performance in a wide range of environments. However, in visually-denied scenarios (e.g. heavy smoke or darkness), pose estimates degrade or even fail. Thermal cameras are commonly used for perception and inspection when the environment has low visibility. However, their use in odometry estimation is hampered by the lack of robust visual features. In part, this is as a result of the sensor measuring the ambient temperature profile rather than scene appearance and geometry. To overcome this issue, we propose a Deep Neural Network model for thermal-inertial odometry (DeepTIO) by incorporating a visual hallucination network to provide the thermal network with complementary information. The hallucination network is taught to predict fake visual features from thermal images by using Huber loss. We also employ selective fusion to attentively fuse the features from three different modalities, i.e thermal, hallucination, and inertial features. Extensive experiments are performed in hand-held and mobile robot data in benign and smoke-filled environments, showing the efficacy of the proposed model.
In the last decade, numerous supervised deep learning approaches requiring large amounts of labeled data have been proposed for visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and depth map estimation. To overcome the data limitation, self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising alternative, exploiting constraints such as geometric and photometric consistency in the scene. In this study, we introduce a novel self-supervised deep learning-based VIO and depth map recovery approach (SelfVIO) using adversarial training and self-adaptive visual-inertial sensor fusion. SelfVIO learns to jointly estimate 6 degrees-of-freedom (6-DoF) ego-motion and a depth map of the scene from unlabeled monocular RGB image sequences and inertial measurement unit (IMU) readings. The proposed approach is able to perform VIO without the need for IMU intrinsic parameters and/or the extrinsic calibration between the IMU and the camera. estimation and single-view depth recovery network. We provide comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the proposed framework comparing its performance with state-of-the-art VIO, VO, and visual simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM) approaches on the KITTI, EuRoC and Cityscapes datasets. Detailed comparisons prove that SelfVIO outperforms state-of-the-art VIO approaches in terms of pose estimation and depth recovery, making it a promising approach among existing methods in the literature.
Extensive research efforts have been dedicated to deep learning based odometry. Nonetheless, few efforts are made on the unsupervised deep lidar odometry. In this paper, we design a novel framework for unsupervised lidar odometry with the IMU, which is never used in other deep methods. First, a pair of siamese LSTMs are used to obtain the initial pose from the linear acceleration and angular velocity of IMU. With the initial pose, we perform the rigid transform on the current frame and align it closer to the last frame. Then, we extract vertex and normal features from the transformed point clouds and its normals. Next a two-branches attention modules are proposed to estimate residual rotation and translation from the extracted vertex and normal features, respectively. Finally, our model outputs the sum of initial and residual poses as the final pose. For unsupervised training, we introduce an unsupervised loss function which is employed on the voxelized point clouds. The proposed approach is evaluated on the KITTI odometry estimation benchmark and achieves comparable performances against other state-of-the-art methods.
Leveraging line features can help to improve the localization accuracy of point-based monocular Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) system, as lines provide additional constraints. Moreover, in an artificial environment, some straight lines are parallel to each other. In this paper, we designed a VIO system based on points and straight lines, which divides straight lines into structural straight lines (that is, straight lines parallel to each other) and non-structural straight lines. In addition, unlike the orthogonal representation using four parameters to represent the 3D straight line, we only used two parameters to minimize the representation of the structural straight line and the non-structural straight line. Furthermore, we designed a straight line matching strategy based on sampling points to improve the efficiency and success rate of straight line matching. The effectiveness of our method is verified on both public datasets of EuRoc and TUM VI benchmark and compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms.
Motion estimation by fusing data from at least a camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) enables many applications in robotics. However, among the multitude of Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) methods, few efficiently estimate device motion with consistent covariance, and calibrate sensor parameters online for handling data from consumer sensors. This paper addresses the gap with a Keyframe-based Structureless Filter (KSF). For efficiency, landmarks are not included in the filters state vector. For robustness, KSF associates feature observations and manages state variables using the concept of keyframes. For flexibility, KSF supports anytime calibration of IMU systematic errors, as well as extrinsic, intrinsic, and temporal parameters of each camera. Estimator consistency and observability of sensor parameters were analyzed by simulation. Sensitivity to design options, e.g., feature matching method and camera count was studied with the EuRoC benchmark. Sensor parameter estimation was evaluated on raw TUM VI sequences and smartphone data. Moreover, pose estimation accuracy was evaluated on EuRoC and TUM VI sequences versus recent VIO methods. These tests confirm that KSF reliably calibrates sensor parameters when the data contain adequate motion, and consistently estimate motion with accuracy rivaling recent VIO methods. Our implementation runs at 42 Hz with stereo camera images on a consumer laptop.