Robust Mono Visual-Inertial Odometry Using Sparse Optical Flow With Edge Detection

In this paper, we present a fast and robust visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithm, which realizes the tight coupling of monocular visual odometry (VO) and low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU). Aiming at the problem of tracking loss caused by the interference of moving objects or blurred images in the traditional VIO algorithm, a sparse optical flow method combining edge detection algorithms is proposed. In the image preprocessing, Laplace edge detection is performed on the original image first, and an area with the most texture is searched according to the sharpened image. When tracking feature points with the sparse optical flow method, the feature points within the searched area are used as the main tracking targets to reduce the impact because of some unclear part in the image on the visual front-end. The trust region dogleg method is used for non-linear optimization in the back-end of the VIO system. The effectiveness of the proposed VIO system is validated on the public data set named EuRoC MAV and compared with the advanced VIO algorithm in recent years. Experimental results show that the new VIO system proposed in this paper has good robustness and can be applied to complex scenes such as fast motion, lighting changes, lack of features, and image blur. Compared with the traditional VIO algorithm, the pose estimation speed of the proposed VIO algorithm can be improved by 10% or more.