Robust real-time visual odometry with a single camera and an IMU

Laurent Kneip, Margarita Chli, Roland Siegwart

Abstract: The increasing demand for real-time high-precision Visual Odometry systems as part of navigation and localization tasks has recently been driving research towards more versatile and scalable solutions. In this paper, we present a novel framework for combining the merits of inertial and visual data from a monocular camera to accumulate estimates of local motion incrementally and reliably reconstruct the trajectory traversed. We demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our methodology in a scenario with challenging camera dynamics, and present a comprehensive evaluation against ground-truth data.