# TransFusionOdom: Interpretable Transformer-based LiDAR-Inertial Fusion Odometry Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.07728 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07728/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 96 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [ViLT: Vision-and-Language Transformer Without Convolution or Region Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03334/) (2021)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Learning with Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06488/) (2022)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer with Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00520/) (2022)
- [Escaping the Big Data Paradigm with Compact Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05704/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15358/) (2021)
- [D3VO: Deep Depth, Deep Pose and Deep Uncertainty for Monocular Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01060/) (2020)
- [LIO-SAM: Tightly-coupled Lidar Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00258/) (2020)
- [FAST-LIO2: Fast Direct LiDAR-inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06829/) (2021)
- [DeepVO: Towards End-to-End Visual Odometry with Deep Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08429/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Token Fusion for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08721/) (2022)
- [Deep Multimodal Fusion by Channel Exchanging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05005/) (2020)
- [Learning Multi-Scene Absolute Pose Regression with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11468/) (2021)
- [Efficient Training of Visual Transformers with Small Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03746/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale High-Resolution Vision Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01236/) (2021)
- [On Feature Collapse and Deep Kernel Learning for Single Forward Pass Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11409/) (2021)
- [FAST-LIO: A Fast, Robust LiDAR-inertial Odometry Package by Tightly-Coupled Iterated Kalman Filter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08196/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11610/) (2021)
- [CF-ViT: A General Coarse-to-Fine Method for Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03821/) (2022)
- [LO-Net: Deep Real-time Lidar Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08242/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DVLO: Deep Visual-LiDAR Odometry with Local-to-Global Feature Fusion and Bi-Directional Structure Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18274/) (2024)
- [Inertial Navigation Meets Deep Learning: A Survey of Current Trends and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00014/) (2023)
- [Astra: Toward General-Purpose Mobile Robots via Hierarchical Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06205/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Large Language Model-based Room-Object Relationships Knowledge for Enhancing Multimodal-Input Object Goal Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14163/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-modal fusion of sensors is a commonly used approach to enhance the performance of odometry estimation, which is also a fundamental module for mobile robots. However, the question of textithow to perform fusion among different modalities in a supervised sensor fusion odometry estimation task? is still one of challenging issues remains. Some simple operations, such as element-wise summation and concatenation, are not capable of assigning adaptive attentional weights to incorporate different modalities efficiently, which make it difficult to achieve competitive odometry results. Recently, the Transformer architecture has shown potential for multi-modal fusion tasks, particularly in the domains of vision with language. In this work, we propose an end-to-end supervised Transformer-based LiDAR-Inertial fusion framework (namely TransFusionOdom) for odometry estimation. The multi-attention fusion module demonstrates different fusion approaches for homogeneous and heterogeneous modalities to address the overfitting problem that can arise from blindly increasing the complexity of the model. Additionally, to interpret the learning process of the Transformer-based multi-modal interactions, a general visualization approach is introduced to illustrate the interactions between modalities. Moreover, exhaustive ablation studies evaluate different multi-modal fusion strategies to verify the performance of the proposed fusion strategy. A synthetic multi-modal dataset is made public to validate the generalization ability of the proposed fusion strategy, which also works for other combinations of different modalities. The quantitative and qualitative odometry evaluations on the KITTI dataset verify the proposed TransFusionOdom could achieve superior performance compared with other related works.