Robust Visual–Inertial Odometry via Multi-Scale Deep Feature Extraction and Flow-Consistency Filtering

We present a visual–inertial odometry (VIO) system that integrates a deep feature extraction and filtering strategy with optical flow to improve tracking robustness. While many traditional VIO methods rely on hand-crafted features, they often struggle to remain robust under challenging visual conditions, such as low texture, motion blur, or lighting variation. These methods tend to exhibit large performance variance across different environments, primarily due to the limited repeatability and adaptability of hand-crafted keypoints. In contrast, learning-based features offer richer representations and can generalize across diverse domains thanks to data-driven training. However, they often suffer from uneven spatial distribution and temporal instability, which can degrade tracking performance. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid front-end that combines a lightweight deep feature extractor with an image pyramid and grid-based keypoint sampling to enhance spatial diversity. Additionally, a forward–backward optical-flow-consistency check is applied to filter unstable keypoints. The system improves feature tracking stability by enforcing spatial and temporal consistency while maintaining real-time efficiency. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed VIO system is validated on the EuRoC MAV benchmark, showing a 19.35% reduction in trajectory RMSE and improved consistency across multiple sequences compared with previous methods.