Talk of the ECCV 2024 paper "Hyperion - A fast, versatile symbolic GBP framework for Continuous-Time SLAM" by David Hug, Ignacio Alzugaray, and Margarita Chli.

Code: https://github.com/VIS4ROB-lab/hyperion
Paper: https://www.ecva.net/papers/eccv_2024...
Poster: https://eccv2024.ecva.net/media/Poste...

Abstract:
Continuous-Time Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (CTSLAM) has become a promising approach for fusing asynchronous and multi-modal sensor suites. Unlike discrete-time SLAM, which estimates poses discretely, CTSLAM uses continuous-time motion parametrizations, facilitating the integration of a variety of sensors such as rolling-shutter cameras, event cameras and Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). However, CTSLAM approaches remain computationally demanding and are conventionally posed as centralized Non-Linear Least Squares (NLLS) optimizations. Targeting these limitations, we not only present the fastest SymForce-based B- and Z-Spline implementations achieving speedups between 2.43x and 110.31x over Sommer et al. but also implement a novel continuous-time Gaussian Belief Propagation (GBP) framework, coined Hyperion, which targets decentralized probabilistic inference across agents. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method in motion tracking and localization settings, complemented by empirical ablation studies.