Inertial Aiding of Inverse Depth SLAM using a Monocular Camera

This paper presents the benefits of using a low cost inertial measurement unit to aid in an implementation of inverse depth initialized SLAM using a hand-held monocular camera. Results are presented with and without inertial observations for different assumed initial ranges to features on the same dataset. When using only the camera, the scale of the scene is not observable. As expected, the scale of the map depends on the prior used to initialize the depth of the features and may drift when exploring new terrain, precluding loop closure. The results show that the inertial observations help to improve the estimated trajectory of the camera leading to a better estimation of the map scale and a more accurate localization of features.