Work

Scene-Adaptive Line-Aware Visual Measurement Conditioning for Stereo Visual–Inertial Odometry

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Accurate stereo visual-inertial measurement is essential for mobile robots operating in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied and structurally complex environments. In stereo visual-inertial odometry (VIO), pose and trajectory outputs depend strongly on the point measurements delivered by the visual front end before sensor-fusion update. In sparse-texture but structurally regular scenes, tracked point features may exhibit poor persistence, uneven spatial distribution, and local tracking noise, even when informative line structures are present. Existing point-line VIO methods can improve positioning accuracy by introducing line landmarks or line residuals, but they usually modify the estimator state, measurement model, and Jacobian treatment. We present a scene-adaptive line-aware visual measurement conditioning method for stereo VIO front ends with point-measurement updates. The method uses 2-D image-line segments as lightweight structural priors and applies bounded normal-direction conditioning to reliable point measurements before a fixed-interface VIO back-end update. A sparse pruning safeguard removes only highly inconsistent long-lived tracks under strong structural support, while a scene-level confidence gate attenuates the intervention when line evidence is weak or unstable. The method is instantiated and evaluated in an S-MSCKF pipeline. On the reported EuRoC MAV sequences, it reduces the sequence-averaged absolute trajectory error (ATE) RMSE by approximately 13% relative to S-MSCKF, with 3-27% reductions on machine-hall sequences. On three real-world robot measurement sequences with an RTK-aided inertial reference, the mean Sim(2)-aligned planar position error decreases from 8.72 m to 7.31 m, and the mean yaw error decreases from 8.02° to 6.76°; an additional scale-preserving SE(2) evaluation reveals sequence-dependent planar behavior and residual metric-scale sensitivity. Candidate-level stereo-consistency diagnostics show subpixel mean and 95th-percentile image-domain perturbations without systematic vertical-stereo bias, while the final reliability-weighted primary-view update is analytically bounded by approximately 0.221 pixels in the reported implementation. Runtime profiling reports an average front-end time of 33.34 ms on the tested CPU platform, close to the 33.3 ms frame period of the 30 Hz stereo input, although the μ+3σ runtime of 47.23 ms exceeds a strict frame-by-frame 30 Hz budget. These results suggest that line-aware front-end conditioning can improve visual measurement quality in structured stereo visual-inertial sensing without modifying the evaluated back-end interface.

Source: Sensors

DOI: 10.3390/s26185760

Authors: Yi Liang, Bingbing Hang, Wenqiang Li, Yue Yuan, Feng Shen

Institutions: Harbin Institute of Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Language: English

Topic: Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization

Subfield: Aerospace Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,137

Funders: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China