Visual-Inertial Odometry

Also known as VIO

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7 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 31

Sep 30, 2026cs.RO

LBDU-VIO: Learned Bias Dynamics and Uncertainty for Visual-Inertial Odometry with Unreliable Vision

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) for aerial robots relies on high rate inertial measurement unit (IMU) propagation between visual updates. However, conventional multi state constraint Kalman filters (MSCKFs) use random walk bias assumptions and fixed noise parameters, which can limit robustness when visual information is unreliable. To address this problem, we propose LBDU-VIO, a learning-augmented MSCKF with learned continuous time bias dynamics and an IMU uncertainty model. A neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) models continuous time bias dynamics to propagate the filter's bias states, replacing their random walk model. The IMU uncertainty model predicts motion adaptive measurement noise covariances for covariance propagation. Both models are trained with pose supervision without direct labels. Experiments on real world EuRoC and TUM-VI benchmarks show lower errors than representative visual-inertial baselines, including a 25.1% reduction in mean relative position error compared with S-MSCKF on EuRoC sequences with 10s visual outage.

Qizhi Guo, Junning Lyu, Defu Lin +1

School of Aerospace Engineering and the Beijing Key Laboratory of UAV Autonomous Control, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

Kalman Filtering Visual-Inertial Odometry Robot State Estimation

Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

Observability Analysis and Online Calibration of Visual-Inertial-Wheel Odometry for 4WIS4WID Mobile Robots

In this paper, we present a visual-inertial-wheel odometry (VIWO) framework with online calibration for four-wheel independently steered and driven (4WIS4WID) mobile robots. We derive a 2D odometry model directly from the four driving velocities and steering angles, using both the longitudinal rolling constraints and the lateral no-slip constraints of all wheels. A preintegration model and analytical Jacobians are developed for efficient filtering and calibration. An observability analysis of the linearized VIWO system shows that a drive-only model makes all steering offsets unobservable, whereas the proposed redundant model restores their observability. The analysis also identifies four standard VINS unobservable directions and three additional directions associated with the arbitrary placement of the odometry reference frame. Furthermore, we characterize several degenerate motions, including zero yaw rate, constant steering, and a non-rolling wheel, and derive the corresponding excitation conditions for the thirteen wheel intrinsics that remain after fixing the odometry frame reference. The performance of the proposed system has been demonstrated in both simulation and real-world experiments on a 4WIS4WID mobile robot.

Branimir Ćaran, Vladimir Milić, Bojan Šekoranja +1

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, 10000, Croatia · Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb, 10000, Croatia

Visual-Inertial Odometry Robot State Estimation

Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

ForVis: An In-Field Dataset and Benchmark for VIO Using Under-Canopy UAV Flights in Forests

Visual-inertial Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VI-SLAM) for UAVs remains difficult to evaluate in real forest environments, where motion, illumination changes, repetitive vegetation, and vibration can all affect estimation. We present ForVis, an in-field dataset and benchmark for evaluating VI-SLAM during UAV flight in forest environments. The dataset contains twelve flights across open meadow, above-canopy, and under-canopy conditions in each environment. In total, it provides 563.8s of flight over 1096.8m of trajectory, recorded simultaneously with an Intel RealSense D435i and an OAK-D Pro Wide together with inertial and flight-controller data. We benchmark seven open-source VI-SLAM systems over 504 runs. The results show that sensor choice has a larger effect on trajectory error than the spread between algorithms: all seven methods achieve lower median error on the OAK-D Pro than on the D435i. ForVis is intended to support evaluation of speed, accuracy and robustness for VI-SLAM in challenging forest flight.

Arman Kiani, Masoud Ataei, Elvis Gyaase +4

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA · School of Forest Resources, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA

UAV Navigation Visual-Inertial SLAM Visual-Inertial Odometry

Sep 23, 2026cs.RO

DAVIO: Dense Monocular-Inertial SLAM with Feed-Forward Initialization and Pose-Conditioned Mapping

A camera and an IMU are the minimal sensor setup for metric localization and dense mapping, yet classical visual--inertial filters must wait for parallax before they start and then retain only sparse landmarks. Feed-forward geometry models, in contrast, predict dense structure from a few images but provide neither metric scale nor gravity. We present DAVIO, which uses a single multi-view depth model, Depth Anything~3, for both start-up and mapping. At start-up, a five-image window and preintegrated IMU measurements form a feature-free linear system. Its robust, conditioning-checked solution bootstraps a VIO filter through buffered replay. During tracking, the filter's metric poses condition the depth model. Residual scale is corrected only along viewing rays, which preserves the metric camera baselines, and a gravity-preserving submap graph with drift-gated revisits refines the map. On EuRoC, DAVIO starts markedly earlier, reduces the localization error, and maps more accurately than SOTA feed-forward mappers given identical poses. On building-scale ORI sequences, DAVIO is on bar or better than SOTA mappers on the same odometry, and degrades far less when GT poses are replaced by real odometry. We release the code of DAVIO, a real-time dense metric SLAM system, to the community.

Jaafar Mahmoud, Arthur Movsesyan, Mikhail Iumanov +1

Biomechatronics and Energy-Efficient Robotics (BE2R) Lab, ITMO University, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Visual-Inertial SLAM Visual-Inertial Odometry

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

Dynamic-LIVO: A Dynamic-Aware LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry System Using Spatio-Temporal Normals

This paper proposes Dynamic-LIVO, a dynamic-aware LiDAR-Inertial-Visual Odometry (LIVO) system for robust state estimation and static colored mapping in dynamic environments. Dynamic-LIVO employs Spatio-Temporal (S-T) normal analysis to identify dynamic LiDAR points and propagates the resulting classification to both LiDAR-inertial and visual-inertial updates, preventing dynamic LiDAR measurements and their associated visual observations from affecting state estimation and mapping. However, S-T normal estimation can be unreliable in newly observed and spatially sparse regions due to insufficient spatio-temporal observations. To address this issue, we introduce a time-delayed S-T normal estimation strategy that defers the classification of insufficiently constrained points and re-evaluates them as additional observations become available. This strategy improves dynamic classification reliability while preserving valid static points for map construction. Extensive experiments on public and self-collected datasets with diverse sensor configurations demonstrate that Dynamic-LIVO improves localization accuracy and produces cleaner static colored maps in challenging dynamic environments. The source code and self-collected dataset will be publicly released upon acceptance.

Zhixin Zhang, Samuel Ahiwe, Matthew Hale +2

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. · Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. · School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, U.K.

Inertial Odometry Camera-LiDAR Fusion Visual-Inertial Odometry Robot Localization

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

Benchmarking Visual-Inertial Odometry in Subterranean Environments Under Sensor Degradation, Miscalibration, and Dynamic Occlusion

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is a core capability for autonomous operation in GPS-denied subterranean environments, yet its reliability can degrade sharply under sensor drift, calibration errors, and dynamic occlusion. Existing evaluations mainly emphasize nominal-condition accuracy, offering limited insight into when practical deployment failures occur. In this work, we present a failure-centric stress-test benchmark for VIO in underground environments using the CERBERUS dataset. We systematically evaluate four representative VIO systems spanning filtering-, optimization-, and learning-based paradigms under nine practical perturbation settings, including IMU bias and noise variation, camera intrinsic and extrinsic drift, and dynamic scene occlusion. Beyond conventional trajectory error, we analyze robustness limits through coverage ratio and failure thresholds, revealing breakdown behaviors that are not captured by nominal-condition performance alone. Our study shows distinct vulnerability patterns across VIO paradigms: some methods are more sensitive to inertial degradation, while others are more affected by geometric miscalibration or dynamic interference. These results provide deployment-oriented guidance for VIO selection, calibration prioritization, and reliable operation in challenging underground scenarios. To support reproducible evaluation and future extensions, we will release the full benchmark scripts and evaluation pipeline.

Yueying Zhu, Xiang Li, Thien-Minh Nguyen +2

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. · Dalian University of Technology, China. · Queensland University, Australia. +1

Robotics Visual-Inertial Odometry

Sep 8, 2026cs.RO

MFVINS: Multiple Fisheye Camera-Based Visual Inertial System

A simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) method using a monocular camera and a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor is an effective way to fulfill a low-cost sensor configuration. Using this sensor configuration, visual-inertial system (VINS) focuses on fusing data from a camera and an IMU sensor to estimate the six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) of the sensor pose. Typically, VINS uses only a single camera as visual input, which lead to problems such as error accumulation due to occlusion, various illumination, and textureless environments. In this paper, we propose a new multiple fisheye camera-based visual-inertial system called MFVINS. We present an IMU-aided FAST feature tracker for multiple cameras that enables efficient extraction and robust matching of local features. Then, the proposed method filters out outliers caused by fisheye distortion on the normalized image plane. Subsequently, a new reprojection error with physical validity constraints is proposed for bundle adjustment using learning-based depth estimation. The proposed method is applied to various scenarios, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by comparing previous VINS methods. In particular, MFVINS is implemented in real-time process to leverage the advantages of using multiple cameras -- robustness against occlusion and textureless regions -- while reducing the computational burden.

Eunseong Jang, YuJin Chung, Sang Jun Lee +2

Division of Electronic Engineering, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, South Korea · BSTAR Robotics, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, USA

Visual-Inertial SLAM Visual-Inertial Odometry

Aug 13, 2026cs.RO

ASPIRE-VINS: Adaptive Spline-based Visual-inertial Navigation System With Robust 3D Measurement Residuals

Visual-inertial navigation systems estimate six-degree-of-freedom motion by fusing visual and inertial data. Modern discrete-time methods with IMU preintegration provide strong accuracy and efficiency, but keyframe-based representations can be less flexible when residuals must be evaluated at arbitrary timestamps or when motion-dependent temporal resolution is needed. Continuous-time splines address this issue by representing the trajectory as a smooth temporal function, but uniformly spaced knots can under-represent rapid dynamics or over-parameterize static intervals. This letter proposes ASPIRE-VINS, a continuous-time VINS framework that combines adaptive knot placement (AKP), multi-resolution splines (MRS), and 3D measurement-space residuals (3D-MSR). AKP allocates knots according to local motion variation, MRS adds bounded local refinement in tangent space, and 3D-MSR provides bearing consistency by aligning transformed features with calibrated observation rays in 3D measurement space. Experiments show that ASPIRE-VINS achieves competitive or lower trajectory errors than the compared baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of motion-adaptive continuous-time trajectory modeling under diverse motion and sensing conditions.

Kwangyik Jung, Eungchang Mason Lee, Taekjun Oh +1

Trajectory Optimization Visual-Inertial Odometry Robot State Estimation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Aug 3, 2026cs.RO

TANGO-VIO: Triangulation-Aware Navigation with Guaranteed Feature-Observability for Visual-Inertial Odometry

In vision-aided navigation and visual-inertial odometry, the quality of triangulated three-dimensional feature positions is a fundamental prerequisite for state estimation accuracy. Triangulation becomes ill-conditioned or even impossible when a camera undergoes pure rotation without translation, or when the observed bearing vectors provide insufficient parallax. Even though visual-inertial odometry has been extensively studied, the active maintenance of feature-observability during navigation has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature. To address this gap, this study presents TANGO-VIO, a triangulation-aware navigation framework that embeds a log-determinant metric of the feature-wise stacked-bearing matrix into a control barrier function. In this proposed method, the observability guarantee is established in the feature-geometric sense by enforcing a lower bound on the aggregate triangulation-information metric through a nominal-direction-weighted minimum-deviation velocity correction. The proposed architecture is evaluated through software-inthe- loop simulations and real flight experiments. The results show improved triangulation conditioning under low-parallax motion, while the flight response closely reproduces the corresponding simulation behavior and confirms the practical realizability of the proposed safety filter. Supplementary materials are available on the project webpage.

Abdülbaki Şanlan, Ege C. Altunkaya, Hasan T. Bağci +2

Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Istanbul Technical University, 34467 Istanbul, Türkiye

Inertial Odometry UAV Navigation Visual-Inertial Odometry

Jul 26, 2026cs.CV

DAP-Pose: Deep Temporal Alignment and Physics-aware Cross-modal Sensor Fusion for Robust Pose Estimation

Robust and accurate pose estimation with multi-modal sensors is fundamental for autonomous vehicles and mobile robotic systems in complex environments. In this paper, we propose DAP-Pose, a unified end-to-end model for robust multi-modal pose estimation. DAP-Pose introduces a Bi-level Cross-modal Fusion (BCF) module that captures complementary semantic and geometric motion cues from visual, inertial, and GNSS measurements. To handle temporal offsets, we designed a Deep Temporal Alignment (DTA) module that explicitly aligns asynchronous streams in latent space, enabling coherent motion modeling without strict hardware synchronization. Furthermore, we incorporate physics-aware constraints via manifold geometry and GNSS-guided absolute metric scale, enforcing motion consistency and mitigating drift. Experiments upon the public KITTI benchmark dataset were conducted to evaluate the performance of DAP-Pose against existing methods. DAP-Pose achieved the state-of-the-art performance, with the lowest average translation error (

t_{rel}

) of 1.31% and rotation error (

r_{rel}

) of 0.46

^{\circ}

. Furthermore, it accurately estimates poses and maintains robust performance under severe artificially injected temporal misalignment.

Jianhan Lin, Yuchu Qin, Jiateng Yuan +2

Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China · International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, Beijing 100094, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Electronic, Electrical and Communication Engineering, Beijing 100049, China +1

Visual-Inertial Odometry Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 24, 2026cs.RO

DB-VIO: Dual-Branch Visual Inertial Odometry with Enhanced Visual-Inertial Representation

Visual inertial odometry (VIO) is essential for accurate 6-DoF motion estimation in mobile robotic systems. Recent learning-based VIO methods have shown promising progress, but they often rely on unified visual--inertial representations and a single temporal model for full-pose estimation, limiting their ability to capture the heterogeneous dynamics of rotation and translation. Moreover, monocular visual features often lack explicit geometric structure, while raw inertial encoding leaves the underlying rotational kinematics implicit, weakening the rotation-related cues in IMU features. To address these issues, we propose DB-VIO, a dual-branch visual inertial odometry framework with enhanced visual--inertial representation. DB-VIO incorporates depth cues to improve monocular visual perception, injects an explicit integrated-attitude prior to strengthen rotation-aware inertial representation, and decouples pose estimation into dedicated rotational and translational branches for motion-specific temporal modeling. Experiments on autonomous driving and aerial robot benchmarks show that DB-VIO achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving the corresponding baselines by 20% on KITTI and 33% on EuRoC. Notably, under the more agile motion patterns of EuRoC, DB-VIO improves the rotational metric by 65.7% over prior methods. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of DB-VIO across different platforms and motion scenarios.

Ziyu Wan, Lin Zhao

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Visual-Inertial Odometry Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 20, 2026cs.RO

Does Robust VIO Need More Learning? Geometry-Verified Visual Measurements under Distribution Shift

Learning is increasingly introduced into visual-inertial odometry (VIO), ranging from learned feature front-ends to learning-dominant motion and geometry estimation. However, learning more of the pipeline does not necessarily improve robustness when deployment conditions differ from the training distribution. This work asks whether robust VIO under distribution shift truly requires deeper learned estimation, or whether learning can be confined to visual measurement generation. We propose a minimal-learning stereo VIO framework in which SEA-RAFT is used only to propose dense stereo correspondences and predict their uncertainty, while temporal tracking, geometric verification, and state estimation remain explicit. Dense flow is sampled at sparse feature locations, filtered using predicted uncertainty and stereo epipolar consistency, and incorporated into a sliding-window stereo-inertial estimator through uncertainty-weighted reprojection factors. The same uncertainty is further propagated through stereo triangulation for downstream anisotropic 3D Gaussian mapping. Experiments on EuRoC, VIODE, and 4Seasons demonstrate accurate and stable estimation under motion blur, dynamic scenes, illumination changes, and large indoor-to-outdoor distribution shifts. Ablations show that learned flow alone is insufficient: the gains arise from combining learned correspondence proposals with geometric verification and uncertainty-aware weighting. These results suggest that, for OOD-robust VIO, carefully integrated learned visual measurements can be more effective than learning a larger fraction of the estimation pipeline. Code and configs for the benchmark will be open-source upon acceptance. A supplementary video is available at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EVRhOkhanmNXHbQS1Vr80FoEIAYOYOV2/view

Yangyang Ning, Shu Liang, Quanbo Ge +3

Department of Control Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

Distribution Shift Robustness Visual-Inertial Odometry

Jul 19, 2026cs.RO

Multi-Resolution Voxelized Map-Based Stereo Visual-Inertial Odometry

Incorporating prior maps significantly enhances the accuracy and robustness of pose estimation in visual-inertial odometry (VIO). However, the large data volume of such maps, combined with limited transmission bandwidth, makes it impractical to continuously load local maps onto an edge device. In this paper, we propose a multi-resolution prior map construction method and a corresponding map-based VIO system. The prior map is voxelized at multiple resolutions, with each voxel retaining only a single map point. During online VIO operation, a cone-shaped indexing strategy associates 2D features on the edge device with 3D map points. The cone's intercept is determined by the distance from the current position to the 3D points, enabling the selection of the appropriate resolution level and the retrieval of the unique map point within the corresponding voxel via a 3D digital differential analyzer (DDA) algorithm. This approach minimizes both the volume of data required for transmission and the computational load during data association. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our system achieves accurate pose estimation while requiring minimal data transmission.

Shuyi Pan, Hangtian Wang, Zhaoxing Zhang +3

Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China · AI Chip Center for Emerging Smart Systems (AC-CESS), InnoHK Centers, Hong Kong Science Park, Hong Kong SAR, China

Visual-Inertial Odometry

Jul 6, 2026cs.RO

DIVO: Continuous-time DVL-Inertial-Visual Odometry for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

This paper presents a novel acoustic-visual-inertial odometry solution leveraging a continuous-time trajectory estimation framework for unmanned underwater vehicles. Underwater environments present unique challenges for visual localization and mapping, such as light attenuation, illumination variance, and the presence of particulate matter. This motivates the use of additional sensing modalities and a visual tracking pipeline that is robust to diverse subsea conditions. The proposed system is the first continuous-time trajectory estimation framework based on Gaussian processes to fuse asynchronous measurements from a Doppler velocity log, a stereo camera, and an inertial measurement unit. Additionally, a novel visual frontend is proposed, incorporating learning-based feature extraction and matching that is robust to the specific challenges that subsea environments present. The proposed framework enables seamless integration of additional sensor modalities in continuous-time and is adaptable to different environments without reconfiguration. The proposed system is extensively tested on real-world underwater inspection datasets, where it outperforms state-of-the-art visual-inertial and acoustic-visual-inertial SLAM algorithms in accuracy, robustness, and trajectory coverage. Notably, the proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art despite only forming short-term visual data associations.

Kyungmin Jung, Angad Bajwa, Junha Yoo +2

Department of Mechanical Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

Underwater Robotics Visual-Inertial Odometry Autonomous Underwater Navigation Robot State Estimation Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jul 2, 2026cs.CV

DL-VINS-Factory: A Modular Framework for Learned Visual Front-Ends in Visual-Inertial SLAM

Deep-learning features excel in visual matching, yet their practical value in tightly coupled visual-inertial SLAM (VI-SLAM) remains insufficiently characterized. We present DL-VINS-Factory, a unified framework that integrates learned feature extractors (ALIKED, RaCo, SuperPoint, XFeat) with either Lucas--Kanade (LK) optical-flow tracking or LightGlue (LG) descriptor matching. All front-ends share a sliding-window Ceres back-end, with optional AnyLoc DINOv2-VLAD loop closure, and 4-DoF pose-graph optimization. We benchmark the system across the four datasets covering indoor, unstructured outdoor, aggressive-motion, and visually degraded conditions. Results show that learned front-ends are viable for real-time embedded VI-SLAM, but are not universally superior to classical tracking. Relative to the corresponding GFTT+LK baseline, ALIKED+LG reduces EuRoC ATE by

5\%

in monocular odometry and by

7\%

in stereo with loop-closure. On NTU-VIRAL, where aggressive aerial motion increases inter-frame viewpoint change, ALIKED+LG stereo reduces loop-closed ATE by

12\%

. In Botanic Garden dataset, optical-flow tracking remains preferable, but learned keypoints still improve over the baseline GFTT, in which SuperPoint+LK reduces grayscale camera ATE by

29\%

, while RaCo+LK reduces RGB camera ATE by

38\%

. On SubT-MRS, learned front-ends display varying degree of improvement based on individual cases. With TensorRT acceleration on a Jetson AGX Orin, all valid configurations run in real time between

29

--

47

FPS in monocular mode and

18

--

33

FPS in stereo mode for the EuRoC and NTU-VIRAL datasets. AnyLoc further confirms roughly

2

--

7\times

more valid loops than BRIEF+DBoW2. The implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/limshoonkit/DL-VINS-Factory-ROS2/.

Shoon Kit Lim, Melissa Jia Ying Chong, Ting Yang Ling

University of Southampton Malaysia, Iskandar Puteri, Johor, Malaysia · University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, U.K.

Visual-Inertial SLAM Visual-Inertial Odometry

Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

Sphere-VIO: Fast and Robust Visual-Inertial Odometry via Unified Spherical Representation for Heterogeneous Multi-Camera Systems

Multi-camera visual-inertial odometry (VIO) overcomes the inherent limitations of pure visual systems by expanding the field of view. However, existing algorithms are typically tailored for fixed camera setups and lack unified compatibility with heterogeneous multi-camera systems. Meanwhile, due to the absence of a unified cross-camera representation and association mechanism, current methods struggle to achieve a balance among robust cross-camera feature tracking, stable depth estimation, and reliable real-time performance. To address these issues, we present Sphere-VIO, a lightweight filter-based VIO framework with unified spherical representation for heterogeneous multi-camera systems. Specifically, we first propose a Unified Spherical Panorama Model (USPM) that supports all standard camera models and enables bidirectional fast mapping between multi-camera images and a shared spherical space without sequential stitching, simplifying cross-camera feature management and improving triangulation efficiency. Second, we design a parallel-accelerated depth-guided semi-direct tracking pipeline, namely Hierarchical Omnidirectional Feature Alignment (HOFA), with global spherical constraints for robust cross-camera matching, and fuse multi-camera depth observations into a standard depth filter for stable initialization. Finally, we develop a multi-camera-adapted ESKF backend that employs spherical bearing residuals and Schur complement marginalization to minimize computational overhead, enabling accurate real-time state estimation on resource-constrained devices. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and a custom omnidirectional dataset show that Sphere-VIO achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy, robustness, efficiency, and cross-camera generality.

Yueteng Yang, Yusen Xie, Hao Wei +5

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou 511453, China · Differential Robotics, Hangzhou 311100, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China +1

Kalman Filtering Visual-Inertial Odometry

Jun 29, 2026cs.RO

Cross-Spectral Stereo Inertial Odometry

Standard stereo VIO focuses exclusively on the benefit of metric scale via single-spectrum baselines, often overlooking the risks of spectral redundancy. This structural limitation leads to correlated failures, where both sensors simultaneously fail in degraded environments that affect their shared spectrum. Leveraging a cross-spectral system presents a complementary solution to this issue, yet the significant appearance gap between modalities renders standard matching ineffective. Existing deep learning-based matchers, while effective, introduce inference latencies that violate real-time constraints. To bridge this gap, we present an asynchronous real-time cross-spectral visual-thermal-inertial (VTI) system that temporally decouples high-latency deep matching from high-rate state estimation. Our architecture incorporates a spectral-aware weighting scheme that dynamically balances modality reliance based on photometric entropy and thermal noise, ensuring robustness against both abrupt lighting changes and thermal artifacts. Furthermore, we introduce a seamless handling mechanism for thermal Non-uniformity Correction (NUC) to maintain tracking continuity. Extensive experiments across diverse scenarios confirm that our system overcomes spectral redundancy, yielding superior accuracy in nominal daylight while ensuring robustness in visually degraded environments. We will open source our code and data: https://github.com/seungsang07/cross-spectral-stereo-inertial-odometry

Seungsang Yun, Hyunsoo Jang, Tai Hyoung Rhee +3

Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, S. Korea

Visual-Inertial Odometry Cross-Modal Feature Matching Multimodal Sensor Fusion

Jun 17, 2026cs.RO

Observability and Consistency Analysis for Visual-Inertial Navigation with Anchored Feature Parameterizations

This paper presents an analysis of the observability and consistency properties of filtering-based visual-inertial navigation systems (VINS) that utilize anchored feature representations. The unobservable subspace of VINS with anchored landmark parameterizations is shown to be independent of the estimated landmark state, which leads to improved estimator consistency properties without any additional modifications. However, the unobservable subspace is still found to depend on the estimated navigation state, necessitating additional consistency-enforcing techniques. Two methods to improve the consistency of VINS with anchored feature representations are presented. Simulation results showcase that all estimators employing anchored feature paramterizations exhibit improved consistency properties compared to algorithms that estimate features resolved in a global reference frame, especially in scenarios where feature initialization may be poor. Real-world experiments on the TUM-VI dataset showcase that the use of anchored feature representations alone can yield comparable performance to consistency-improved estimators employing a global feature representation, demonstrating the benefit of using anchored feature parameterizations for VINS.

Mitchell Cohen, Vassili Korotkine, James Richard Forbes

Department of Mechanical Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 0C3, Canada

Visual-Inertial Odometry

Jun 17, 2026cs.RO

Hardware- and Vision-in-the-Loop Validation of Deep Monocular Pose Estimation for Autonomous Maritime UAV Flight

Autonomous UAV operations on ships require reliable vision-based relative pose estimation, yet at-sea validation is costly, weather-dependent, and risky. This paper presents a hardware-validated vision-in-the-loop framework that enables fully autonomous indoor flight while emulating photorealistic maritime environments. Rendered maritime views are processed onboard by a deep transformer-based monocular pose estimator. Delayed vision measurements are fused with high-rate IMU data using a delayed Kalman filter to provide consistent state estimates for geometric control. The system captures critical embedded effects, including perception latency, asynchronous updates, and computational constraints, that are absent in pure simulation. Autonomous takeoff, trajectory tracking, and landing experiments demonstrate stable closed-loop flight. The results establish a safe and hardware-realistic intermediate stage for developing maritime UAV autonomy prior to shipboard deployment.

Maneesha Wickramasuriya, Beomyeol Yu, Jaden Shin +3

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052

Robotics Simulation UAV Navigation Camera Pose Estimation Visual-Inertial Odometry

Jun 8, 2026cs.RO

Dual Quaternion-Based Unscented Kalman Filter with Visual Inertial Odometry for Navigation in GPS-Denied Environments

Reliable navigation in GPS-denied environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics, aerospace, and autonomous vehicle applications. This paper presents a Dual Quaternion-Based Unscented Kalman Filter (DQUKF) equipped with a Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) algorithm for accurate state estimation enabling navigation in GPS denied locations. The proposed framework formulates the DQUKF in an error state manner, where the nominal pose is represented by a unit dual quaternion and the local pose error is represented by a 6-dimensional twistor parameterization used for sigma point generation, covariance propagation, and measurement correction. In parallel, the VIO algorithm tracks features across image frames, synchronizes measurements between the IMU and camera, and provides visual constraints that complement inertial propagation. Simulation results on the EuRoC MAV dataset show that the proposed DQUKF converges under high initialization uncertainty and achieves a position RMSE of 0.2584~m in the difficult flight sequence, outperforming the benchmark filters.

Mohamed Khalifa, Hashim A. Hashim

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, K1S-5B6, Canada

Kalman Filtering Inertial Odometry GNSS-Denied Localization Unscented Kalman Filtering Visual-Inertial Odometry Robot State Estimation

Jun 3, 2026cs.RO

Uncertainty-Aware Adaptive Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Navigation

This work introduces a hybrid deep learning approach integrated with an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) to enhance pose estimation accuracy in Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) for autonomous navigation. The proposed model employs a Vision Transformer (ViT) network to effectively capture temporal dependencies from inertial measurement unit (IMU) data and utilizes a Multiscale Convolutional Neural Network (MCNN) to learn optical flow-based motion cues from visual data. An adaptive sensor fusion module dynamically weights IMU and visual features by leveraging estimated uncertainty, thus improving robustness in diverse and challenging environmental conditions. Additionally, a novel uncertainty-aware loss function is proposed to explicitly incorporate prediction uncertainty into the learning process, enabling robust and accurate navigation under noisy, incomplete, or unreliable sensor inputs. Comprehensive evaluations of the KITTI dataset demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms baseline approaches, achieving superior performance in terms of Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) and Relative Pose Error (RPE). The lightweight and computationally efficient model processes data at 155 FPS on an NVIDIA A100 GPU, making it highly suitable for deployment in resource-constrained autonomous systems.

Simegnew Yihunie Alaba, Yuichi Motai

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA 23220, USA

Unscented Kalman Filtering Visual-Inertial Odometry Multimodal Sensor Fusion

May 30, 2026cs.RO

BEVIO: Efficient Bird's-Eye-View based Sparse-Update Visual-Inertial Odometry for Lunar Day-Night Navigation

Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) provides smooth, high-rate state estimates and has been widely used for robotic navigation in both terrestrial and planetary applications. However, its performance is typically dependent on the frequency of visual updates, which is a challenge for planetary rovers operating under extreme resource constraints and low frame rates. This work investigates enabling reliable VIO with very sparse visual updates for lunar rover applications, addressing both day and night-time operations where feature associations become especially difficult under self-illumination conditions. We propose a Bird's Eye View (BEV)-based image matching scheme that remains robust to larger inter-frame motions and more reliable feature matching despite significant visual appearance changes. We extensively evaluate our proposed approach, BEVIO, through high-fidelity photorealistic lunar and real-time robotic experiments conducted using a half-scale lunar rover, in a long-term day-night deployment at Plaster City, CA, USA. The results demonstrate that our method enables reliable day and nighttime self-illuminated traverses at visual update rates as low as 0.25 Hz, underscoring its suitability for navigation on power- and compute-limited lunar rovers.

Mohit Singh, Shehryar Khattak, Ashish Goel +3

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. · Autonomous Robots Lab at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

Robot Navigation Visual Odometry Bird's-Eye-View Representation Visual-Inertial Odometry

May 19, 2026cs.RO

Minimalist Visual Inertial Odometry

Visual-Inertial Odometry(VIO), which is critical to mobile robot navigation, uses cameras with a large number of pixels. Capturing and processing camera images requires significant resources. This work presents a minimalist approach to planar odometry, demonstrating that just four visual measurements and an IMU can provide robust motion estimation for differential-drive robots. Our key insight is that four downward-facing photodiodes that sense the world through optical Gabor masks produce signals that encode speed. Based on this, we jointly optimize the mask parameters alongside a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) using a physically-grounded simulator. The resulting model decodes speed from just the four measurements produced by the photodiodes. Pairing these estimates with the angular speed from an IMU yields a continuous planar trajectory. We validate our approach with a prototype sensor mounted on a differential drive robot. Across diverse indoor and outdoor terrains, our system closely tracks the reference ground truth without any real-world fine-tuning. Our work shows that minimalist sensing enables efficient and accurate planar odometry.

Francesco Pasti, Jeremy Klotz, Nicola Bellotto +1

Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Padua, Italy · Computer Science Department, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Inertial Odometry Mobile Robotics Visual-Inertial Odometry Robot State Estimation

May 17, 2026cs.RO

MUSE: Multimodal Uncertainty Quantification of State Estimation

Accurate visual state estimation has been a central topic in robotics with a wide range of applications in robot navigation, autonomous driving, and autonomous flight. Recent advances in robot perception have led to significant improvements in the accuracy and robustness of state estimation, yet a fundamental challenge remains in how to quantify and calibrate its precision, i.e., how confident we are in an estimate and whether failures can be detected. This issue is particularly pronounced in visual-inertial odometry (VIO), where the heteroscedastic and multimodal nature of the problem makes uncertainty quantification especially difficult. This paper introduces MUSE (Multimodal Uncertainty Quantification of State Estimation), a novel real-time learning-based framework that leverages the strong and efficient sequential modeling capacity of Mamba to estimate localization uncertainty from multiple asynchronous sensor streams. Experiments on both public and in-house datasets demonstrate that MUSE achieves superior reliability and robustness compared to existing uncertainty quantification methods, and ablation studies justify the benefits of its key design choices.

Minkyung Kim, Henry Che, Bhargav Chandaka +6

Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61801, USA · Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61801, USA · Department of Electrical Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA

Uncertainty Quantification Visual-Inertial Odometry

May 17, 2026cs.RO

Efficient Feature-Free Initialization for Monocular Visual-Inertial Systems Using a Feed-Forward 3D Model

Fast and reliable initialization is critical for monocular visual-inertial navigation systems (VINS), as it establishes the starting conditions for subsequent state estimation. Despite steady progress, most existing methods heavily rely on visual feature correspondences and require 3-4 seconds of sensory data for successful initialization, which limits their applicability and efficiency. With the advent of feed-forward 3D models that can directly predict point clouds from images, we revisit the visual-inertial initialization problem from a concise perspective. In this work, we propose a feature-free initialization framework that leverages up-to-scale point clouds predicted by a feed-forward 3D model, thereby obviating the need for visual feature tracking and estimation. This design substantially reduces system complexity and improves the reliability of initialization. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed feature-free initialization method achieves the highest success rate, exceeding 90%, and significantly reduces the data duration required for successful initialization, typically to under 1.2 s. We further validate our method on a self-collected dataset covering various indoor and outdoor scenarios, demonstrating robust performance, particularly in visually degraded environments where existing methods often fail. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Yuantai-Z/FF-VIO-Init.

Yuantai Zhang, Jiaqi Yang, Huajian Zeng +5

MBZUAI · HKUST (GZ) · Zhejiang University

Visual-Inertial Odometry

Apr 27, 2026cs.RO

Event-based SLAM Benchmark for High-Speed Maneuvers

Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors with pixels that independently and asynchronously respond to brightness changes at microsecond resolution, offering the potential to handle visual tasks in high-speed maneuvering scenarios. Existing event-based approaches, although successful in mitigating motion blur caused by high-speed maneuvers, suffer from many limitations. Some of them highlight a success of pose tracking for a fronto-parallel fast shaking camera closed to the structure, while others assume pure (optionally aggressive) three-degree-of-freedom rotations. The former requires persistent local map visibility within the field of view (FOV), whereas the latter fails to generalize to six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) motions where both linear and angular velocities may be large. Consequently, current successes do not fully demonstrate that event-based state estimation under arbitrary aggressive maneuvers is a fully solved problem. To quantitatively assess the extent to which the potential of event cameras has been unlocked, we conduct a thorough analysis of state-of-the-art (SOTA) event-based visual odometry (VO)/visual-inertial odometry (VIO) methods and report shortcomings in current public datasets. Furthermore, we introduce a benchmarking framework for event-based state estimation, called EvSLAM, characterized by sufficient variation in data collection platforms, diverse extreme lighting scenarios, and a wide scope of challenging motion patterns under a clear and rigorous definition of high-speed maneuvers for mobile robots, along with a novel evaluation metric designed to fairly assess the operational limits of event-based solutions. This framework benchmarks state-of-the-art methods, yielding insights into optimal architectures and persistent challenges.

Sheng Zhong, Junkai Niu, Guillermo Gallego +7

Neuromorphic Automation and Intelligence Lab (NAIL) at the School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha, China · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin, the Science of Intelligence Excellence Cluster, the Robotics Institute Germany and the Einstein Center Digital Future, Berlin, Germany · College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China +1

Event-Based Vision Visual Odometry Visual-Inertial Odometry

Apr 16, 2026cs.RO

CT-VIR: Continuous-Time Visual-Inertial-Ranging Fusion for Indoor Localization with Sparse Anchors

Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is widely used for mobile robot localization, but its long-term accuracy degrades without global constraints. Incorporating ranging sensors such as ultra-wideband (UWB) can mitigate drift; however, high-accuracy ranging usually requires well-deployed anchors, which is difficult to ensure in narrow or low-power environments. Moreover, most existing visual-inertial-ranging (VIR) fusion methods rely on discrete time-based filtering or optimization, making it difficult to balance positioning accuracy, trajectory consistency, and fusion efficiency under asynchronous multi-sensor sampling. To address these issues, we propose a spline-based continuous-time state estimation method for VIR fusion localization. In the preprocessing stage, VIO motion priors and UWB ranging measurements are used to construct virtual anchors and reject outliers, thereby alleviating geometric degeneration and improving range reliability. In the estimation stage, the pose trajectory is parameterized in continuous time using a B-spline, while inertial, visual, and ranging constraints are formulated as factors in a sliding-window graph. The spline control points, together with a small set of auxiliary parameters, are then jointly optimized to obtain a continuous-time trajectory estimate. Evaluations on public datasets and real-world experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practical potential of the proposed approach.

Yu-An Liu, Li Zhang

School of Mathematics, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230031, China

Wireless Localization Visual-Inertial Odometry Robot Localization

Mar 23, 2026cs.CV

Online Adaptation of Visual Odometry Frontends with Image-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Visual odometry (VO) frontends are typically tuned offline by domain experts on pre-recorded datasets and then deployed with fixed hyperparameters. Yet a configuration that performs best on a benchmark is not guaranteed to remain best when texture, illumination, motion blur, sensor noise, or computational conditions change at deployment. We propose a frontend that instead adapts its parameters automatically and continuously. We formulate frontend tuning as a sequential decision-making problem and introduce an image-conditioned reinforcement-learning policy that combines a lightweight embedding of the current image with a compact set of frontend statistics. At each decision step, the policy selects the FAST detection threshold, KLT patch size, and RANSAC rejection threshold; a privileged critic provides additional context only during training. Trained on synthetic TartanAirV2 data, the policy transfers zero-shot to a monocular-inertial OpenVINS pipeline on EuRoC, TUM-VI, and UZH-FPV. On synthetic test sequences, the learned policy improves the tracking-computation trade-off over an optimized static parameter configuration. On the three real-world benchmarks, it reduces mean ATE by up to 8% and runtime by up to 57% relative to static parameters baseline. These results show that image-conditioned online adaptation can improve the accuracy-computation trade-off beyond a single configuration selected offline.

Simone Nascivera, Leonard Bauersfeld, Jeff Delaune +1

Robotics and Perception Group, University of Zurich, Switzerland. · Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA.

Test-Time Adaptation Visual Odometry Visual-Inertial Odometry

Mar 22, 2026cs.RO

Quantifying Motion Excitation for Metric Scale Observability in Monocular Visual-Inertial Odometry

Monocular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) cannot recover metric scale from vision alone; scale must be resolved through inertial measurements. We present a trajectory-dependent observability analysis showing that translational acceleration, produced by curvature, not constant-speed straight-line travel, is the fundamental source that couples scale to the inertial state. This relationship is formalized through the gravity-acceleration asymmetry in the IMU model, from which we derive rank conditions on the observability matrix and propose a lightweight excitation metric computable from raw IMU data. Controlled experiments on a differential-drive robot with a monocular camera and consumer-grade IMU validate the theory, with straight-line motion yielding 9.2% scale error, circular motion 6.4%, and figure-eight motion 4.8%, with excitation spanning four orders of magnitude. These results establish trajectory design as a practical mechanism for improving metric scale recovery.

Hadush Hailu, Bruk Gebregziabher, Siddhartha Gudipudi +1

Computer Science, Maharishi International University, Iowa, USA · Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia · Computer Science, Iowa State University, Iowa, USA +1

Inertial Odometry Visual-Inertial Odometry Inertial Navigation

Feb 11, 2026cs.CV

MDE-VIO: Enhancing Visual-Inertial Odometry Using Learned Depth Priors

Traditional monocular Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) systems struggle in low-texture environments where sparse visual features are insufficient for accurate pose estimation. To address this, dense Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) has been widely explored as a complementary information source. While recent Vision Transformer (ViT) based complex foundational models offer dense, geometrically consistent depth, their computational demands typically preclude them from real-time edge deployment. Our work bridges this gap by integrating learned depth priors directly into the VINS-Mono optimization backend. We propose a novel framework that enforces affine-invariant depth consistency and pairwise ordinal constraints, explicitly filtering unstable artifacts via variance-based gating. This approach strictly adheres to the computational limits of edge devices while robustly recovering metric scale. Extensive experiments on the TartanGround and M3ED datasets demonstrate that our method prevents divergence in challenging scenarios and delivers significant accuracy gains, reducing Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) by up to 28.3%. Code will be made available.

Arda Alniak, Sinan Kalkan, Mustafa Mert Ankarali +2

Dept. of Electrical & Electronics Engineering · Center for Image Analysis (OGAM), METU, Ankara, Türkiye · Dept. of Computer Engineering

Inertial Odometry Visual-Inertial Odometry