A Loosely Coupled Vision-LiDAR Odometry using Covariance Intersection Filtering

This paper presents a loosely-coupled sensor fusion approach, which efficiently combines complementary visual and range sensor information to estimate the vehicle ego-motion. Descriptor-based and distance-based matching strategies are respectively applied to visual and range measurements for feature tracking. Nonlinear optimization optimally estimates the relative pose across consecutive frames and an uncertainty analysis using forward and backward covariance propagation is made to model the estimation accuracy. Covariance intersection filter paves the way for us to loosely couple stereo vision and LiDAR odometry considering respective uncertainties. We evaluate our approach with KITTI dataset which shows its effectiveness to fierce rotational motion and temporary absence of visual features, achieving the average relative translation error of 0.84% for the challenging 01 sequence on the highway.