In this paper we derive and test a probability-based weighting that can balance residuals of different types in spline fitting. In contrast to previous formulations, the proposed spline error weighting scheme also incorporates a prediction of the approximation error of the spline fit. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the prediction in a synthetic experiment, and apply it to visual-inertial fusion on rolling shutter cameras. This results in a method that can estimate 3D structure with metric scale on generic first-person videos. We also propose a quality measure for spline fitting, that can be used to automatically select the knot spacing. Experiments verify that the obtained trajectory quality corresponds well with the requested quality. Finally, by linearly scaling the weights, we show that the proposed spline error weighting minimizes the estimation errors on real sequences, in terms of scale and end-point errors.
Visual-inertial fusion on rolling shutter cameras has classically been done using Extended Kalman-filters (EKF). @cite_17 use an EKF to track cell-phone orientation for the purpose of video stabilization. @cite_21 extend this to full device motion tracking, and @cite_22 add tracking of changes in relative pose between the sensors and changes in linear camera intrinsics.
@cite_21 @cite_22 @cite_17
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All existing methods for vision-aided inertial navigation assume a camera with a global shutter, in which all the pixels in an image are captured simultaneously. However, the vast majority of consumer-grade cameras use rolling-shutter sensors, which capture each row of pixels at a slightly different time instant. The effects of the rolling shutter distortion when a camera is in motion can be very significant, and are not modelled by existing visual-inertial motion-tracking methods. In this paper we describe the first, to the best of our knowledge, method for vision-aided inertial navigation using rolling-shutter cameras. Specifically, we present an extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based method for visual-inertial odometry, which fuses the IMU measurements with observations of visual feature tracks provided by the camera. The key contribution of this work is a computationally tractable approach for taking into account the rolling-shutter effect, incurring only minimal approximations. The experimental results from the application of the method show that it is able to track, in real time, the position of a mobile phone moving in an unknown environment with an error accumulation of approximately 0.8 of the distance travelled, over hundreds of meters. In this paper, we focus on the problem of motion tracking in unknown environments using visual and inertial sensors. We term this estimation task visual-inertial odometry (VIO), in analogy to the well-known visual-odometry problem. We present a detailed study of extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based VIO algorithms, by comparing both their theoretical properties and empirical performance. We show that an EKF formulation where the state vector comprises a sliding window of poses (the multi-state-constraint Kalman filter (MSCKF)) attains better accuracy, consistency, and computational efficiency than the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) formulation of the EKF, in which the state vector contains the current pose and the features seen by the camera. Moreover, we prove that both types of EKF approaches are inconsistent, due to the way in which Jacobians are computed. Specifically, we show that the observability properties of the EKF's linearized system models do not match those of the underlying system, which causes the filters to underestimate the uncertainty in the state estimates. Based on our analysis, we propose a novel, real-time EKF-based VIO algorithm, which achieves consistent estimation by (i) ensuring the correct observability properties of its linearized system model, and (ii) performing online estimation of the camera-to-inertial measurement unit (IMU) calibration parameters. This algorithm, which we term MSCKF 2.0, is shown to achieve accuracy and consistency higher than even an iterative, sliding-window fixed-lag smoother, in both Monte Carlo simulations and real-world testing. This paper proposes an ego-motion tracking method that utilizes visual-inertial sensors for wearable blind navigation. The unique challenge of wearable motion tracking is to cope with arbitrary body motion and complex environmental dynamics. We introduce a visual sanity check to select accurate visual estimations by comparing visually estimated rotation with measured rotation by a gyroscope. The movement trajectory is recovered through adaptive fusion of visual estimations and inertial measurements, where the visual estimation outputs motion transformation between consecutive image captures, and inertial sensors measure translational acceleration and angular velocities. The frame rates of visual and inertial sensors are different, and vary with respect to time owning to visual sanity checks. We hence employ a multirate extended Kalman filter (EKF) to fuse visual and inertial estimations. The proposed method was tested in different indoor environments, and the results show its effectiveness and accuracy in ego-motion tracking. The main contribution of this paper is an extended Kalman filter (EKF)based algorithm for estimating the 6 DOF pose of a camera using monocular images of an indoor environment. In contrast to popular visual simultaneous localisation and mapping algorithms, the technique proposed relies on a pre-built map represented as an unsigned distance function of the ground plane edges. Images from the camera are processed using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)to extract a ground plane edge image. Pixels that belong to these edges are used in the observation equation of the EKF to estimate the camera location. Use of the CNN makes it possible to extract ground plane edges under significant changes to scene illumination. The EKF framework lends itself to use of a suitable motion model, fusing information from any other sensors such as wheel encoders or inertial measurement units, if available, and rejecting spurious observations. A series of experiments are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.