616 research outputs found
Keyframe-based visual–inertial odometry using nonlinear optimization
Combining visual and inertial measurements has become popular in mobile robotics, since the two sensing modalities offer complementary characteristics that make them the ideal choice for accurate visual–inertial odometry or simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). While historically the problem has been addressed with filtering, advancements in visual estimation suggest that nonlinear optimization offers superior accuracy, while still tractable in complexity thanks to the sparsity of the underlying problem. Taking inspiration from these findings, we formulate a rigorously probabilistic cost function that combines reprojection errors of landmarks and inertial terms. The problem is kept tractable and thus ensuring real-time operation by limiting the optimization to a bounded window of keyframes through marginalization. Keyframes may be spaced in time by arbitrary intervals, while still related by linearized inertial terms. We present evaluation results on complementary datasets recorded with our custom-built stereo visual–inertial hardware that accurately synchronizes accelerometer and gyroscope measurements with imagery. A comparison of both a stereo and monocular version of our algorithm with and without online extrinsics estimation is shown with respect to ground truth. Furthermore, we compare the performance to an implementation of a state-of-the-art stochastic cloning sliding-window filter. This competitive reference implementation performs tightly coupled filtering-based visual–inertial odometry. While our approach declaredly demands more computation, we show its superior performance in terms of accuracy
An Underwater SLAM System using Sonar, Visual, Inertial, and Depth Sensor
This paper presents a novel tightly-coupled keyframe-based Simultaneous
Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system with loop-closing and relocalization
capabilities targeted for the underwater domain. Our previous work, SVIn,
augmented the state-of-the-art visual-inertial state estimation package OKVIS
to accommodate acoustic data from sonar in a non-linear optimization-based
framework. This paper addresses drift and loss of localization -- one of the
main problems affecting other packages in underwater domain -- by providing the
following main contributions: a robust initialization method to refine scale
using depth measurements, a fast preprocessing step to enhance the image
quality, and a real-time loop-closing and relocalization method using bag of
words (BoW). An additional contribution is the addition of depth measurements
from a pressure sensor to the tightly-coupled optimization formulation.
Experimental results on datasets collected with a custom-made underwater sensor
suite and an autonomous underwater vehicle from challenging underwater
environments with poor visibility demonstrate performance never achieved before
in terms of accuracy and robustness
Visual-Inertial Mapping with Non-Linear Factor Recovery
Cameras and inertial measurement units are complementary sensors for
ego-motion estimation and environment mapping. Their combination makes
visual-inertial odometry (VIO) systems more accurate and robust. For globally
consistent mapping, however, combining visual and inertial information is not
straightforward. To estimate the motion and geometry with a set of images large
baselines are required. Because of that, most systems operate on keyframes that
have large time intervals between each other. Inertial data on the other hand
quickly degrades with the duration of the intervals and after several seconds
of integration, it typically contains only little useful information.
In this paper, we propose to extract relevant information for visual-inertial
mapping from visual-inertial odometry using non-linear factor recovery. We
reconstruct a set of non-linear factors that make an optimal approximation of
the information on the trajectory accumulated by VIO. To obtain a globally
consistent map we combine these factors with loop-closing constraints using
bundle adjustment. The VIO factors make the roll and pitch angles of the global
map observable, and improve the robustness and the accuracy of the mapping. In
experiments on a public benchmark, we demonstrate superior performance of our
method over the state-of-the-art approaches
LDSO: Direct Sparse Odometry with Loop Closure
In this paper we present an extension of Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) to a
monocular visual SLAM system with loop closure detection and pose-graph
optimization (LDSO). As a direct technique, DSO can utilize any image pixel
with sufficient intensity gradient, which makes it robust even in featureless
areas. LDSO retains this robustness, while at the same time ensuring
repeatability of some of these points by favoring corner features in the
tracking frontend. This repeatability allows to reliably detect loop closure
candidates with a conventional feature-based bag-of-words (BoW) approach. Loop
closure candidates are verified geometrically and Sim(3) relative pose
constraints are estimated by jointly minimizing 2D and 3D geometric error
terms. These constraints are fused with a co-visibility graph of relative poses
extracted from DSO's sliding window optimization. Our evaluation on publicly
available datasets demonstrates that the modified point selection strategy
retains the tracking accuracy and robustness, and the integrated pose-graph
optimization significantly reduces the accumulated rotation-, translation- and
scale-drift, resulting in an overall performance comparable to state-of-the-art
feature-based systems, even without global bundle adjustment
Incremental Visual-Inertial 3D Mesh Generation with Structural Regularities
Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) algorithms typically rely on a point cloud
representation of the scene that does not model the topology of the
environment. A 3D mesh instead offers a richer, yet lightweight, model.
Nevertheless, building a 3D mesh out of the sparse and noisy 3D landmarks
triangulated by a VIO algorithm often results in a mesh that does not fit the
real scene. In order to regularize the mesh, previous approaches decouple state
estimation from the 3D mesh regularization step, and either limit the 3D mesh
to the current frame or let the mesh grow indefinitely. We propose instead to
tightly couple mesh regularization and state estimation by detecting and
enforcing structural regularities in a novel factor-graph formulation. We also
propose to incrementally build the mesh by restricting its extent to the
time-horizon of the VIO optimization; the resulting 3D mesh covers a larger
portion of the scene than a per-frame approach while its memory usage and
computational complexity remain bounded. We show that our approach successfully
regularizes the mesh, while improving localization accuracy, when structural
regularities are present, and remains operational in scenes without
regularities.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, ICRA accepte
- …