SchurVINS: Schur Complement-Based Lightweight Visual Inertial Navigation System
Authors: Yunfei Fan, Tianyu Zhao, Guidong Wang

Accuracy and computational efficiency are the most important metrics to Visual Inertial Navigation System (VINS). The existing VINS algorithms with either high accuracy or low computational complexity are difficult to provide the high precision localization in resource-constrained devices. To this end we propose a novel filter-based VINS framework named SchurVINS (SV) which could guarantee both high accuracy by building a complete residual model and low computational complexity with Schur complement. Technically we first formulate the full residual model where Gradient Hessian and observation covariance are explicitly modeled. Then Schur complement is employed to decompose the full model into ego-motion residual model and landmark residual model. Finally Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) update is implemented in these two models with high efficiency. Experiments on EuRoC and TUM-VI datasets show that our method notably outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both accuracy and computational complexity. The experimental code of SchurVINS is available at https://github.com/bytedance/SchurVINS.