In monocular vision systems, lack of knowledge about metric distances caused by the inherent scale ambiguity can be a strong limitation for some applications. We offer a method for fusing inertial measurements with monocular odometry or tracking to estimate metric distances in inertial-monocular systems and to increase the rate of pose estimates. As we performed the fusion in a loosely-coupled manner, each input block can be easily replaced with one's preference, which makes our method quite flexible. We experimented our method using the ORB-SLAM algorithm for the monocular tracking input and Euler forward integration to process the inertial measurements. We chose sets of data recorded on UAVs to design a suitable system for flying robots.
@article{arxiv.1707.07518,
title = {A Loosely-Coupled Approach for Metric Scale Estimation in Monocular Vision-Inertial Systems},
author = {Ariane Spaenlehauer and Vincent Fremont and Y. Ahmet Sekercioglu and Isabelle Fantoni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07518},
year = {2017}
}