Fast and Robust Monocular Visua-Inertial Odometry Using Points and Lines

• Main Authors: Ning Zhang, Yongjia Zhao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-10-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: line feature; point-line feature fusion; semi-direct method
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/20/4545

When the camera moves quickly and the image is blurred or the texture in the scene is missing, the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm based on point feature experiences difficulty tracking enough effective feature points, and the positioning accuracy and robustness are poor, and even may not work properly. For this problem, we propose a monocular visual odometry algorithm based on the point and line features and combining IMU measurement data. Based on this, an environmental-feature map with geometric information is constructed, and the IMU measurement data is incorporated to provide prior and scale information for the visual localization algorithm. Then, the initial pose estimation is obtained based on the motion estimation of the sparse image alignment, and the feature alignment is further performed to obtain the sub-pixel level feature correlation. Finally, more accurate poses and 3D landmarks are obtained by minimizing the re-projection errors of local map points and lines. The experimental results on EuRoC public datasets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the Open Keyframe-based Visual-Inertial SLAM (OKVIS-mono) algorithm and Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF-SLAM (ORB-SLAM) algorithm, which demonstrates the accuracy and speed of the algorithm.