Visual-inertial odometry of smartphone under Manhattan world

Abstract

Based on the hypothesis of the Manhattan world, we propose a tightly-coupled monocular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) system that combines structural features with point features and can run on a mobile phone in real-time. The back-end optimization is based on the sliding window method to improve computing efficiency. As the Manhattan world is abundant in the man-made environment, this regular world can use structural features to encode the orthogonality and parallelism concealed in the building to eliminate the accumulated rotation error. We define a structural feature as an orthogonal basis composed of three orthogonal vanishing points in the Manhattan world. Meanwhile, to extract structural features in real-time on the mobile phone, we propose a fast structural feature extraction method based on the known vertical dominant direction. Our experiments on the public datasets and self-collected dataset show that our system is superior to most existing open-source systems, especially in the situations where the images are texture-less, dark, and blurry.