LF-VIO: A Visual-Inertial-Odometry Framework for Large Field-of-View Cameras with Negative Plane

TL;DR

LF-VIO introduces a real-time visual-inertial odometry framework tailored for cameras with extremely large and negative field-of-view, utilizing a novel 3D vector representation for features and validated on a new panoramic dataset.

Contribution

The paper presents LF-VIO, a novel VIO framework for large FoV cameras with a 3D feature representation and introduces the PALVIO dataset for panoramic visual odometry research.

Findings

LF-VIO outperforms existing methods on PALVIO and public datasets.

The 3D vector representation effectively handles negative half-plane features.

The PALVIO dataset provides comprehensive panoramic visual odometry data.

Abstract

Visual-inertial-odometry has attracted extensive attention in the field of autonomous driving and robotics. The size of Field of View (FoV) plays an important role in Visual-Odometry (VO) and Visual-Inertial-Odometry (VIO), as a large FoV enables to perceive a wide range of surrounding scene elements and features. However, when the field of the camera reaches the negative half plane, one cannot simply use [u,v,1]^T to represent the image feature points anymore. To tackle this issue, we propose LF-VIO, a real-time VIO framework for cameras with extremely large FoV. We leverage a three-dimensional vector with unit length to represent feature points, and design a series of algorithms to overcome this challenge. To address the scarcity of panoramic visual odometry datasets with ground-truth location and pose, we present the PALVIO dataset, collected with a Panoramic Annular Lens (PAL) system with an entire FoV of 360{\deg}x(40{\deg}-120{\deg}) and an IMU sensor. With a comprehensive variety of experiments, the proposed LF-VIO is verified on both the established PALVIO benchmark and a public fisheye camera dataset with a FoV of 360{\deg}x(0{\deg}-93.5{\deg}). LF-VIO outperforms state-of-the-art visual-inertial-odometry methods. Our dataset and code are made publicly available at https://github.com/flysoaryun/LF-VIO