xivo VS open_vins

Hey there, interested in camera and range sensor fusion for point cloud (depth) completion?

Here is an extended version of our [talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBCKO4TH5y0) at ICRA 2020 where we do a step by step walkthrough of our paper Unsupervised Depth Completion from Visual Inertial Odometry (joint work with Fei Xiaohan, Stephanie Tsuei, and Stefano Soatto).

In this talk, we present an unsupervised method (no need for human supervision/annotations) for learning to recover dense point clouds from images, captured by cameras, and sparse point clouds, produced by lidar or tracked by visual inertial odometry (VIO) systems. To illustrate what I mean, here is an [example](https://github.com/alexklwong/unsupervised-depth-completion-visual-inertial-odometry/blob/master/figures/void_teaser.gif?raw=true) of the point clouds produced by our method.

Our method is light-weight (so you can run it on your computer!) and is built on top of [XIVO] (https://github.com/ucla-vision/xivo) our VIO system.

For those interested here are links to the [paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.08616.pdf), [code](https://github.com/alexklwong/unsupervised-depth-completion-visual-inertial-odometry) and the [dataset](https://github.com/alexklwong/void-dataset) we collected.

Our method is light-weight (so you can run it on your computer!) and is built on top of XIVO our VIO system.

From what I have understood after reading research papers related to the VSLAM, the modularity aspect is not easy to achieve given the extracted features and descriptors are intrinsically linked with feature matching and handling of map points. I would like to know if there are some good Open Source VSLAM projects available which can be used with different feature extractors so I can get a comparative results with respect to just changing the feature extractors . I have tried pyslam project which is actually quite good considering the modularity but as the author himself points out this is only for academic purposes and when I compared the results of ORB_SLAM2 feature extractor using this module vs the original ORB_SLAM2 for KITTI data set , the results are not comparable. I am also looking into OpenVINS ( and from initial reading it is also using ORB Features, although it does have a base Tracker class which can be modified to create a new Tracker with different descriptor) If anyone has worked with custom feature extractor incorporated into prebuilt SLAM pipeline and can guide me as to how to proceed with the implementation of custom Feature extractor into a SLAM Front end using a Open Source VSLAM framework, it will be really helpful.

Because the standard MSCKF is the only one that doesn't contain the map points in the state. Note that this is only for the standard MSCKF. More modern MSCKFS variations like OpenVINS will actually add some SLAM features because it improves the accuracy.

Aside from that there have been some publications of some high quality open source SLAM systems like OpenVINS and ORB-SLAM3.

Check out open vins. Its an implementation of the vins slam project. https://github.com/rpng/open_vins

Generally you want to use a Kalman Filter based method if you want access to the uncertainties. This is because it is much easier to extract a subset of the covariance in the kalman filter form. I would recommend OpenVins. One of the best open source visual odometry projects, and it is pretty well documented.