A Real-Time Visual-Inertial Monocular Odometry by Fusing Point and Line Features

In this paper, a monocular visual-inertial odometry that utilize both point and line features is deduced. Compared with point features, line features provide more geometric information of the environment, which are more reliable in textureless scenes. However, extracting line segment features from the image are very time consuming, which will affect the real-time performance of the system. To deal with this problem, EDLines line segment detector is introduced to replace the LSD algorithm. Geometric properties of lines are utilized to reject the mismatching of line segment feature. Plucker coordinates and orthonormal representation of lines are used to represent 3D lines. Afterwards, we optimize the state by minimizing a cost function consists of pre-integrated IMU residuals and visual feature re-projection residuals in a sliding window optimization framework. The proposed odometry was tested on the public datasets. The results demonstrate that the presented system can operate in real time with high accuracy.