Papers › ESVO2: Direct Visual-Inertial Odometry with Stereo Event Cameras

ESVO2: Direct Visual-Inertial Odometry with Stereo Event Cameras

12 Oct 2024arXiv:2410.09374archive 2025-07-28

Junkai Niu, Sheng Zhong, Xiuyuan Lu, Shaojie Shen, Guillermo Gallego, Yi Zhou

Event-based visual odometry is a specific branch of visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques, which aims at solving tracking and mapping subproblems (typically in parallel), by exploiting the special working principles of neuromorphic (i.e., event-based) cameras. Due to the motion-dependent nature of event data, explicit data association (i.e., feature matching) under large-baseline view-point changes is difficult to establish, making direct methods a more rational choice. However, state-of-the-art direct methods are limited by the high computational complexity of the mapping sub-problem and the degeneracy of camera pose tracking in certain degrees of freedom (DoF) in rotation. In this paper, we tackle these issues by building an event-based stereo visual-inertial odometry system on top of a direct pipeline. Specifically, to speed up the mapping operation, we propose an efficient strategy for sampling contour points according to the local dynamics of events. The mapping performance is also improved in terms of structure completeness and local smoothness by merging the temporal stereo and static stereo results. To circumvent the degeneracy of camera pose tracking in recovering the pitch and yaw components of general 6-DoF motion, we introduce IMU measurements as motion priors via pre-integration. To this end, a compact back-end is proposed for continuously updating the IMU bias and predicting the linear velocity, enabling an accurate motion prediction for camera pose tracking. The resulting system scales well with modern high-resolution event cameras and leads to better global positioning accuracy in large-scale outdoor environments. Extensive evaluations on five publicly available datasets featuring different resolutions and scenarios justify the superior performance of the proposed system against five state-of-the-art methods.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

nail-hnu/esvo2 officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Pose TrackingSimultaneous Localization and MappingVisual Odometrymotion prediction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

SPEED

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections