Observability-Aware Self-Calibration of Visual and Inertial Sensors for Ego-Motion Estimation

External effects such as shocks and temperature variations affect the calibration of visual–inertial sensor systems and thus they cannot fully rely on factory calibrations. Re-calibrations performed on short user-collected datasets might yield poor performance since the observability of certain parameters is highly dependent on the motion. In addition, on resource-constrained systems (e.g., mobile phones), full-batch approaches over longer sessions quickly become prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we approach the self-calibration problem by introducing information theoretic metrics to assess the information content of trajectory segments, thus allowing to select the most informative parts from a dataset for calibration purposes. With this approach, we are able to build compact calibration datasets either: 1) by selecting segments from a long session with limited exciting motion or 2) from multiple short sessions where a single session does not necessarily excite all modes sufficiently. Real-world experiments in four different environments show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance to a batch calibration approach, yet, at a constant computational complexity which is independent of the duration of the session.