Rotational Coordinate Transformation for Visual-Inertial Sensor Fusion

Visual and inertial sensors are used collaboratively in many applications because of their complementary properties. The problem associated with sensor fusion is relative coordinate transformations. This paper presents a quaternion-based method to estimate the relative rotation between visual and inertial sensors. Rotation between a camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is represented by quaternions, which are separately measured to allow the sensor to be optimized individually. Relative quaternions are used so that the global reference is not required to be known. The accuracy of the coordinate transformation was evaluated by comparing with a ground-truth tracking system. The experiment analysis proves the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of accuracy and robustness.

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