Stereo Visual-Inertial Odometry With Multiple Kalman Filters Ensemble

In this paper, we present a stereo visual-inertial odometry algorithm assembled with three separated Kalman filters, i.e., attitude filter, orientation filter, and position filter. Our algorithm carries out the orientation and position estimation with three filters working on different fusion intervals, which can provide more robustness even when the visual odometry estimation fails. In our orientation estimation, we propose an improved indirect Kalman filter, which uses the orientation error space represented by unit quaternion as the state of the filter. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated through extensive experimental results, including the benchmark KITTI datasets and some challenging datasets captured in a rough terrain campus.