Covariance Estimation for Pose Graph Optimization in Visual-Inertial Navigation Systems

Pose graph optimization helps reduce drift accumulated in pure odometry of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems by solving a nonlinear least square problem, including both sequential constraints and loop-closing constraints. However, the covariances of all constraints are set to constant matrices or by manual setting. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to approximate covariances of constraints in pose graph optimization to better represent the true uncertainty of the underlying visual-inertial navigation system (VINS) that fuses inertial measurements and visual observations. Specifically, for sequential constraints, we propose to utilize nonlinear factor recovery to optimally extract covariance matrices from the accumulated visual-inertial odometry (VIO). For loop-closing constraints, we propose a dynamic scale estimation method to approximate the scales of the information matrices. To evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on public and self-collected datasets in various environments. Results show that our proposed method achieves higher accuracy compared with naively-formulated pose graph optimization adopted by several state-of-the-art visual-inertial navigation systems.