Accuracy vs Speed Trade-offs in Multi-Frame LiDAR-based Linear Correction for Visual Odometry

Our previously proposed linear approach for reducing the global drift of a video-based frame-to-frame trajectory estimation method corrects it at selected points in time based on the alignment of one past and the current 3D LiDAR measurements (see [7]). In this paper we improve on that method essentially by adding multi-past frame LiDAR point cloud alignment constraints and by performing the correction more often. While this significantly improves the accuracy of the estimation, it has the downside effect of decreasing the overall runtime performance. We thus study the trade-off between accuracy and speed and propose a couple of higher accuracy but real time correction versions. Their evaluation on the KITTI dataset results in an overall performance falling into the so called SLAM-nonSLAM gap.