DRT-VI-OSTC

A Rotation-Translation Decoupled Solution for Visual-Inertial Initialization and Online Spatial-Temporal Calibration

This repository provides the official implementation of our rotation–translation decoupled initialization and online spatial-temporal calibration method for Visual–Inertial Odometry (VIO).

Our method enables robust and accurate VIO initialization, even under pure rotational motion, while simultaneously estimating gyroscope bias, extrinsic rotation, and camera–IMU time offset.

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📌 Overview

Visual–Inertial Odometry (VIO) systems critically rely on a reliable initialization stage.
However, existing initialization methods often:

• Suffer from limited accuracy or robustness
• Fail under small or zero translational motion
• Ignore simultaneous spatial–temporal calibration, despite its practical importance

To address these challenges, we propose a novel rotation–translation decoupled VIO initialization framework with integrated online spatial-temporal calibration.

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✨ Key Contributions

• Rotation–Translation Decoupled Initialization

  • Decouples rotation and translation estimation to improve robustness and accuracy

• Simultaneous Spatio-Temporal Calibration

  • Jointly estimates:
    • Gyroscope bias
    • Camera–IMU extrinsic rotation
    • Camera–IMU time offset
  • Works even under pure rotational motion

• Observability Analysis

  • First to analyze rotational constraint observability in decoupling-based methods
  • Identifies unobservable state-space directions under three degenerate motions

• Practical Parameter Boundary Analysis

  • Extensive experiments reveal practical solvable regions
  • Significantly improves real-world applicability

• Efficient and Robust

  • Maintains low computational cost
  • Improves convergence behavior of downstream VIO systems

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🚀 Quick Start

🙏 Acknowledgements

📜 Citation

📄 License