Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 3747: Robust Stereo Visual-Inertial Odometry Using Nonlinear Optimization

Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 3747: Robust Stereo Visual-Inertial Odometry Using Nonlinear Optimization
Sensors doi: 10.3390/s19173747
Authors:
Ma
Bai
Wang
Fang

The fusion of visual and inertial odometry has matured greatly due to the complementarity of the two sensors. However, the use of high-quality sensors and powerful processors in some applications is difficult due to size and cost limitations, and there are also many challenges in terms of robustness of the algorithm and computational efficiency. In this work, we present VIO-Stereo, a stereo visual-inertial odometry (VIO), which jointly combines the measurements of the stereo cameras and an inexpensive inertial measurement unit (IMU). We use nonlinear optimization to integrate visual measurements with IMU readings in VIO tightly. To decrease the cost of computation, we use the FAST feature detector to improve its efficiency and track features by the KLT sparse optical flow algorithm. We also incorporate accelerometer bias into the measurement model and optimize it together with other variables. Additionally, we perform circular matching between the previous and current stereo image pairs in order to remove outliers in the stereo matching and feature tracking steps, thus reducing the mismatch of feature points and improving the robustness and accuracy of the system. Finally, this work contributes to the experimental comparison of monocular visual-inertial odometry and stereo visual-inertial odometry by evalu...

Source: Sensors - August 28, 2019 Category: Biotechnology Authors: Ma Bai Wang Fang Tags: Article Source Type: research