On October 4th 2018, the paper "Online temporal calibration for monocular visual-inertial systems" by Ph.D. student Tong Qin wins the Best Student Paper Award in the 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018) at Madrid, Spain.
In this paper, we propose an online approach for calibrating temporal offset between visual and inertial measurements. Our approach achieves temporal offset calibration by jointly optimizing time offset, camera and IMU states, as well as feature locations in a SLAM system. Furthermore, the approach is a general model, which can be easily employed in several feature-based optimization frameworks. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the high accuracy of our calibration approach even compared with other state-of-art offline tools. The VIO comparison against other methods proves that the online temporal calibration significantly benefits visual-inertial systems. The source code of temporal calibration is integrated into our public project, VINS-Mono.
