Effect of camera-IMU displacement calibration error on tracking performance

Abstract

Due to their complementary properties, inertial measurement units (IMU) and cameras are used in ego-motion tracking applications. For this, the relative rotation and displacement between the camera and IMU reference frames has to be known. There are established methods for the accurate estimation of the relative orientation, however, accurate estimation of the displacement is still a challenging problem. When this is not possible, one might resort to the alternative approach of fusing camera and gyroscope data only, as this does not require the displacement information. To be able to asses such alternatives, this paper presents a systematic methodology based on realistic simulations to analyze the effect of the camera - IMU displacement calibration error on tracking performance, and discusses in detailed simulations the dependency of tracker performance metrics on the camera - IMU displacement's magnitude and calibration error.