Visual-Inertial Monocular SLAM With Map Reuse

In recent years there have been excellent results in visual-inertial odometry techniques, which aim to compute the incremental motion of the sensor with high accuracy and robustness. However, these approaches lack the capability to close loops and trajectory estimation accumulates drift even if the sensor is continually revisiting the same place. In this letter, we present a novel tightly coupled visual-inertial simultaneous localization and mapping system that is able to close loops and reuse its map to achieve zero-drift localization in already mapped areas. While our approach can be applied to any camera configuration, we address here the most general problem of a monocular camera, with its well-known scale…