Which upgrade buys the most visual-inertial accuracy: a sharper camera or a better IMU?

What it found

A planar synthetic visual-inertial smoother (bearing landmarks, 100 Hz gyro and accelerometer) on 12 s paths, 8 paired seeds. Camera resolution moved drift: 1.18 % of path rms at 1280 px against 1.65 % at 640 px and 8.9 % at 320 px. Scaling IMU noise 0.25× to 4× changed it by under 10 %, inside the noise. Limitations: the smoother has no marginalisation and diverged on 30 s paths, so the IMU result is for short runs only; planar, synthetic, not EuRoC.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

More in Sensing, imaging and 3D

• Does bundle adjustment repair wrong camera poses in a multi-view reconstruction?With 12 views, 0.5 px noise and every camera pose wrong, bundle adjustment cuts mean surface error from 0.0117 to 0.0014 object radii (the true-pose floor), 8× here and 73× at 0.2 radii of position error, but only 1.4× at 4 px of pixel noise and not at all with 4 views. Synthetic only
• Does bundle adjustment that solves for the focal length survive a wrong assumed focal length or lens distortion?With 12 views, wrong poses and a focal length told 5% wrong, a fixed-focal adjustment costs 1.2× the true-focal error (2.7× at 20%); solving for the focal returns the floor with the focal within 0.3%, and for k1 = −0.3 distortion 0.0034 falls to 0.0015, but not at 4 views or above 2 px noise. Synthetic only
• If the lens has a second radial term the solver does not model, does self-calibrating bundle adjustment still recover the surface?Rendering with k1 = −0.2 and k2 swept from −0.2 to +0.4, a bundle adjustment solving for the focal and k1 only returns 0.0015 object radii, the same as one that also solves k2, against 0.0022–0.0030 with no distortion model; the lens parameters are not separately identified (k1 stays near −0.16, k2 sits about 0.16 low) and the gain vanishes by 2 px noise. Synthetic only
• Does a wide field of view make the second radial lens term identifiable in self-calibrating bundle adjustment?Moving the camera in and shortening the focal length (800 to 400 px) raises the largest normalised radius from 0.34 to 0.85, and the spread of the fitted k2 over seeds falls from 0.33 to 0.02 with its mean within 0.01 of truth; the surface then needs k2 (0.0027 with k1 only against 0.0020 with both). Synthetic only
• How many mismatched feature observations can bundle adjustment survive, and does a robust loss help?With 12 views and wrong camera poses, 2% of observations replaced by random pixels already raise bundle-adjustment surface error from 0.0014 to 0.079 object radii, and Huber or Cauchy loss from the usual all-view start only halve that; a per-point RANSAC start fixes 5% (0.0319) but only 24 views get back to the clean floor at 10% (0.0012). Synthetic only
• What does an unmodelled principal-point offset cost a self-calibrating bundle adjustment, and does a wide field of view help or hurt?A 10 px principal-point offset held at the image centre raises the surface error from 0.0019 to 0.0043 object radii on the wide rig (focal 3.5% off) against 0.0019 to 0.0015 fitted on the narrow one; fitting the point recovers it and removes the cost. Synthetic only

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.