Event-Based Visual-Inertial State Estimation for High-Speed Maneuvers

Neuromorphic event-based cameras are bioinspired visual sensors with asynchronous pixels and extremely high temporal resolution. Such favorable properties make them an excellent choice for solving state estimation tasks under high-speed maneuvers. However, failures of camera pose tracking are frequently witnessed in state-of-the-art event-based visual odometry systems when the local map cannot be updated timely or feature matching is unreliable. One of the biggest roadblocks in this field is the absence of efficient and robust methods for data association without imposing any assumptions on the environment. This problem seems, however, unlikely to be addressed as in standard vision because of the motion-dependent nature of event data. To address this, we propose a map-free design for event-based visual-inertial state estimation in this article. Instead of estimating camera position, we find that recovering the instantaneous linear velocity aligns better with event cameras’ differential working principle. The proposed system uses raw data from a stereo event camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) as input, and adopts a dual-end architecture. The front-end preprocesses raw events and executes the computation of normal flow and depth information. To handle the temporally nonequispaced event data and establish association with temporally nonaligned IMU’s measurements, the back-end employs a continuous-time formulation and a sliding-window scheme that can progressively estimate the linear velocity and IMU’s bias. Experiments on synthetic and real data show our method achieves low-latency, metric-scale velocity estimation. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first real-time, purely event-based visual-inertial state estimator for high-speed maneuvers, requiring only sufficient textures and imposing no additional constraints on either the environment or motion pattern.