Python tools for DM-VIO: Delayed Marginalization Visual-Inertial Odometry

When using this project in academic work, please consider citing:

@article{stumberg22dmvio,
  author = {L. von Stumberg and D. Cremers},
  title = {{DM-VIO}: Delayed Marginalization Visual-Inertial Odometry},
  journal = {{IEEE} Robotics and Automation Letters ({RA-L})},
  year = {2022},
  volume = {7},
  number = {2},
  pages = {1408-1415},
  doi = {10.1109/LRA.2021.3140129}
}

Dependencies:

Install dependencies with:

    pip3 install tqdm ruamel.yaml pyquaternion matplotlib tabulate

Step 0: Download and build DM-VIO

Go to https://github.com/lukasvst/dm-vio.git and follow the build instructions.

Step 1: Create config

For each machine you want to run DM-VIO on, you first need to create a configuration inside configs.yaml. The script create_config.py does this for you:

git clone https://github.com/lukasvst/dm-vio-python-tools.git
cd dm-vio-python-tools
python3 create_config.py --name=workpc --dmvio_folder=/path/to/dmvio --results_folder=/results/will/be/saved/here

Step 2: Download and Prepare datasets

Run any of the following commands to download and prepare the respective dataset:

python3 download_euroc.py --folder=/dataset/shall/be/saved/here/euroc
python3 download_tumvi.py --folder=/dataset/shall/be/saved/here/tumvi
python3 download_4seasons.py --folder=/dataset/shall/be/saved/here/4seasons

# Useful For testing: use --only_seq to only download the first sequence
python3 download_euroc.py --folder=/dataset/shall/be/saved/here/euroc --only_seq=0

For EuRoC and 4Seasons you should still run the above command even if you have already downloaded the dataset, because they perform necessary preparations (interpolating IMU data, etc.) for DM-VIO to run on the respective dataset. The scripts will skip downloading existing folders, so you can pass the existing location of the dataset.

Step 3: Run DM-VIO on datasets

These commands are good to start with (only run one sequence each, with GUI, etc.)

python3 run_dmvio.py --output=console --dataset=euroc --dmvio_settings=euroc.yaml --withgui --iter=1 --only_seq=10
python3 run_dmvio.py --output=console --dataset=tumvi --dmvio_settings=tumvi.yaml --withgui --iter=1 --only_seq=25
python3 run_dmvio.py --output=console --dataset=4seasons --dmvio_settings=4seasons.yaml --withgui --iter=1 --only_seq=0

--only_seq makes it run on only one sequence (e.g. V2_03 / slides1 in the examples above)

--iter=1 makes it run on each sequence only once (where the default is 10 times on EuRoC and 5 times on TUM-VI / 4Seasons)

When you leave these settings out, it will perform a full evaluation on the dataset, keep in mind that this will take a lot of time. Here you can find the commands for generating all paper results.

The script run_dmvio.py will not only run DM-VIO but it will also save useful information (like the used version of the code, versions of installed libraries, etc.) to setup/setup.yaml. This makes sure that results cannot get mixed up and helps reproducability.

Interesting commandline arguments

To show all arguments just run

python3 run_dmvio.py --help

Most important arguments are

  • dataset: To specify which dataset to evaluate one.
  • dmvio_settings: The settings file (located relative to the config folder in the DM-VIO source code), which can specify multiple parameters (and IMU noise values).
  • dmvio_args: Additional commandline arguments passed to DM-VIO. These will also override settings potentially set in the settings file passed with dmvio_settings.

Step 4: Create Python evaluation evaluation file

Evaluating your results is a two-step process. First a python evaluation file is created:

python3 create_python_evaluation_file.py

This will generate a new file evaluations.py (in the main folder of this project) which contains commands to compute the absolute trajectory error for each result on your machine. Each line looks similar to this:

# Main paper result. settings=tumvi.yaml maxPreloadImages=16000
res3_RT_tumvi_mac, gtscale_3_RT_tumvi_mac = evaluate_run(Path(folder) / 'dmvioresult-tumvi-RT-2021-08-28--18-44-35', Dataset.tumvi, 5, '3_RT_tumvi_mac Main paper result.: output=null_quiet settings=tumvi.yaml maxPreloadImages=16000 ')

After executing this line (e.g. in a Jupyter notebook), res3_RT_tumvi_mac will contain the evaluation results when using the estimated scale, and gtscale_3_RT_tumvi_mac will contain the results when using the groundtruth scale. In practice you should almost always use the former res*, unless the method cannot observe the metric scale (like when passing --noimu).

The comment line above each result shows the commit message of the version of the code used for this run, as well as the used settings and if there were local changes to the code (indicated by +DIFF). The result name provides some information about the run, like which machine it was run on, which commit of the code was used, if it was realtime (RT), if only a part of the dataset was evaluated on (_part), etc.

You can use the following tools to analyse the results:

Create a plot where each execution is represented by a colored square (useful to get a quick overview over a result)

square_plot(res3_RT_tumvi_mac)

Cumulative error plot. This should be the main tool for comparing results as it summarizes all executions in a meaningful way

line_plot([res3_RT_tumvi_mac, res6_RT_tumvi_mac])

Results table. Print the median error for each sequence and the mean median rmse (euroc) / mean median drift (TUM-VI)

results_table([res3_RT_tumvi_mac, res6_RT_tumvi_mac])

As an example how to use these commands, you can look at the script paper_evaluations.py, which generates the plots shown in the paper. In the script you need to set the folder to the paper results, which you can download here.

Hint: For using these tools in practice, I recommend to either

  • open an interactive python console, run from evaluations import * in it and then run any of the plots above.
  • use a Jupyter notebook or normal python script to perform more complex analysis. For this you should copy individual lines from evaluations.py over to the Jupyter notebook (rather than importing the evaluations.py), to make sure that the names don’t change when new results are added and evaluations.py is regenerated.

You can also modify create_python_evaluation_file.py to filter results or sort them differently.

Using multiple machines for running (and how to use configs.yaml)

These evaluation tools are designed with multiple machines for evaluations in mind. The idea is that for each machine one configuration inside configs.yaml is created see above. The configs.yaml file can be shared across machines with Git (by forking this repository). The only local-only file is defaultconfig.txt which should not be put into Git and defines which configuration should be used for each machine.

Syncing results to central machine (e.g. a server)

The tools support

  • automatic uploading of results to a central machine after run_dmvio.py has finished.

  • automatic downloading of results from the central machine at the beginning of create_evaluation_file.py. For this, just use set following fields of your configuration in configs.yaml, e.g.:

    rsync_command: rsync -rav -e "ssh -p YOUR_SSH_PORT"
rsync_command_target: [email protected]:/folder/to/save/results/on/central/machine

When setting this up properly you can use run_dmvio.py on any of your machines, and afterwards run create_python_evaluation_file.py on your home machine to gather all results.

License

This repository is published under the BSD 3-Clause License. The files trajectory_evaluation/associate.py and trajectory_evaluation/evaluate.py are based on the TUM-RGBD tools written by Juergen Sturm. Some changes to it like the Sim(3) alignment are inspired by the dso-Matlab-evaluation tools written by Jakob Engel. The times and groundtruth files for EuRoC are taken from the supplementary material for DSO. The other code was written by Lukas von Stumberg at TUM.

GitHub

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