PI-VIO: Robust and Efficient Stereo Visual Inertial Odometry using Points and Lines

In this paper, we present the PerceptIn Visual Inertial Odometry (PI-VIO), a tightly-coupled filtering-based stereo VIO system using both points and lines. Line features help improve system robustness in challenging scenarios when point features cannot be reliably detected or tracked, e.g. lowtexture environment or lighting change. In addition, we propose a new lightweight filtering-based loop closing technique to reduce accumulated drift without global bundle adjustment. We formulate loop closure as EKF updates to optimally relocate the current sliding window maintained by the filter to past keyframes. We also present the PerceptIn Ironsides dataset, a new visual-inertial dataset, featuring high-quality synchronized stereo camera and IMU data from the Ironsides sensor [3] with various motion types and textures and millimeter-accuracy groundtruth. To validate the performance of the proposed system, we conduct extensive comparison with state-of-the-art approaches (OKVIS, VINS-MONO and S-MSCKF) using both the public EuRoC dataset and the PerceptIn Ironsides dataset.