PC-VINS-Mono: A Robust Mono Visual-Inertial Odometry with Photometric Calibration

Feature detection and Tracking, which heavily rely on the gray value information of images, is a very importance procedure for Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) and the tracking results significantly affect the accuracy of the estimation results and the robustness of VIO. In high contrast lighting condition environment, images captured by auto exposure camera shows frequently change with its exposure time. As a result, the gray value of the same feature in the image show vary from frame to frame, which poses large challenge to the feature detection and tracking procedure. Moreover, this problem further been aggravated by the nonlinear camera response function and lens attenuation. However, very few VIO methods take full advantage of photometric camera calibration and discuss the influence of photometric calibration to the VIO. In this paper, we proposed a robust monocular visual-inertial odometry, PC-VINS-Mono, which can be understood as an extension of the opens-source VIO pipeline, VINS-Mono, with the capability of photometric calibration. We evaluate the proposed algorithm with the public dataset. Experimental results show that, with photometric calibration, our algorithm achieves better performance comparing to the VINS-Mono.