# Faster than FAST: GPU-Accelerated Frontend for High-Speed VIO

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13493 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13493/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Microsaccade-inspired Event Camera for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17769/) (2024)
- [High-Speed Stereo Visual SLAM for Low-Powered Computing Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04090/) (2024)
- [Faster than Fast: Accelerating Oriented FAST Feature Detection on Low-end Embedded GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07164/) (2025)
- [Embedded Vision for Self-Driving on Forest Roads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13754/) (2021)
- [Accelerated Feature Detectors for Visual SLAM: A Comparative Study of FPGA vs GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13546/) (2025)
- [VkVIO: Cross-platform GPU Acceleration for Visual-Inertial Odometry with Vulkan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30459/) (2026)
- [HexVIO: Towards All-Day Stereo-Inertial Tracking Through Commodity DSPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03283/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recent introduction of powerful embedded graphics processing units (GPUs) has allowed for unforeseen improvements in real-time computer vision applications. It has enabled algorithms to run onboard, well above the standard video rates, yielding not only higher information processing capability, but also reduced latency. This work focuses on the applicability of efficient low-level, GPU hardware-specific instructions to improve on existing computer vision algorithms in the field of visual-inertial odometry (VIO). While most steps of a VIO pipeline work on visual features, they rely on image data for detection and tracking, of which both steps are well suited for parallelization. Especially non-maxima suppression and the subsequent feature selection are prominent contributors to the overall image processing latency. Our work first revisits the problem of non-maxima suppression for feature detection specifically on GPUs, and proposes a solution that selects local response maxima, imposes spatial feature distribution, and extracts features simultaneously. Our second contribution introduces an enhanced FAST feature detector that applies the aforementioned non-maxima suppression method. Finally, we compare our method to other state-of-the-art CPU and GPU implementations, where we always outperform all of them in feature tracking and detection, resulting in over 1000fps throughput on an embedded Jetson TX2 platform. Additionally, we demonstrate our work integrated in a VIO pipeline achieving a metric state estimation at ~200fps.