# ESVO2: Direct Visual-Inertial Odometry with Stereo Event Cameras

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09374 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09374/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 99 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [DSEC: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06011/) (2021)
- [The Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10202/) (2018)
- [LIO-SAM: Tightly-coupled Lidar Inertial Odometry via Smoothing and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00258/) (2020)
- [A Unifying Contrast Maximization Framework for Event Cameras, with Applications to Motion, Depth, and Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01306/) (2018)
- [Ultimate SLAM? Combining Events, Images, and IMU for Robust Visual SLAM in HDR and High Speed Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06310/) (2017)
- [Bringing a Blurry Frame Alive at High Frame-Rate with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10180/) (2018)
- [Asynchronous, Photometric Feature Tracking using Events and Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09713/) (2018)
- [Time Lens++: Event-based Frame Interpolation with Parametric Non-linear Flow and Multi-scale Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17191/) (2022)
- [Event-based Stereo Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15548/) (2020)
- [EventNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from a Single Colour Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11896/) (2022)
- [Secrets of Event-Based Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10022/) (2022)
- [Learning Monocular Dense Depth from Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08350/) (2020)
- [Focus Is All You Need: Loss Functions For Event-based Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07235/) (2019)
- [E-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from a Moving Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11300/) (2022)
- [Recent Event Camera Innovations: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13627/) (2024)
- [Semi-Dense 3D Reconstruction with a Stereo Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07429/) (2018)
- [Ev-NeRF: Event Based Neural Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12455/) (2022)
- [Unifying Motion Deblurring and Frame Interpolation with Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12178/) (2022)
- [Continuous-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07389/) (2017)
- [Event-based, 6-DOF Camera Tracking from Photometric Depth Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03468/) (2016)
- [Graph-based Asynchronous Event Processing for Rapid Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14419/) (2023)
- [Speed Invariant Time Surface for Learning to Detect Corner Points with Event-Based Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11332/) (2019)
- [EVDodgeNet: Deep Dynamic Obstacle Dodging with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02919/) (2019)
- [VECtor: A Versatile Event-Centric Benchmark for Multi-Sensor SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01404/) (2022)
- [TUM-VIE: The TUM Stereo Visual-Inertial Event Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07329/) (2021)
- [Event Collapse in Contrast Maximization Frameworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04007/) (2022)
- [ESVIO: Event-based Stereo Visual Inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13184/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Event Camera Meets Mobile Embodied Perception: Abstraction, Algorithm, Acceleration, Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22943/) (2025)
- [SuperEvent: Cross-Modal Learning of Event-based Keypoint Detection for SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00139/) (2025)
- [DERD-Net: Learning Depth from Event-based Ray Densities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15863/) (2025)
- [A Linear N-Point Solver for Structure and Motion from Asynchronous Tracks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22733/) (2025)
- [Fast Feature Field (F3): A Predictive Representation of Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25146/) (2025)
- [Event-based Sensor Fusion and Application on Odometry: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15480/) (2024)
- [E2EGS: Event-to-Edge Gaussian Splatting for Pose-Free 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14684/) (2026)
- [Match-Any-Events: Zero-Shot Motion-Robust Feature Matching Across Wide Baselines for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18744/) (2026)
- [EROAM: Event-based Camera Rotational Odometry and Mapping in Real-time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11004/) (2024)
- [SuperEIO: Self-Supervised Event Feature Learning for Event Inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22963/) (2025)
- [X-IONet: Cross-Platform Inertial Odometry Network for Pedestrian and Legged Robot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08277/) (2025)
- [RoEL: Robust Event-based 3D Line Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18258/) (2026)
- [Real-time Motion Segmentation with Event-based Normal Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20790/) (2026)
- [Edged USLAM: Edge-Aware Event-Based SLAM with Learning-Based Depth Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08150/) (2026)
- [A Geometric Framework for Absolute Pose and Velocity Estimation with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09139/) (2026)
- [E-S2Feat:Semantic-Guided Spiking Local Feature Detection and Description for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14027/) (2026)
- [An Event Preserving Velocity Invariant Representation for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19973/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event-based visual odometry is a specific branch of visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques, which aims at solving tracking and mapping subproblems (typically in parallel), by exploiting the special working principles of neuromorphic (i.e., event-based) cameras. Due to the motion-dependent nature of event data, explicit data association (i.e., feature matching) under large-baseline view-point changes is difficult to establish, making direct methods a more rational choice. However, state-of-the-art direct methods are limited by the high computational complexity of the mapping sub-problem and the degeneracy of camera pose tracking in certain degrees of freedom (DoF) in rotation. In this paper, we tackle these issues by building an event-based stereo visual-inertial odometry system on top of a direct pipeline. Specifically, to speed up the mapping operation, we propose an efficient strategy for sampling contour points according to the local dynamics of events. The mapping performance is also improved in terms of structure completeness and local smoothness by merging the temporal stereo and static stereo results. To circumvent the degeneracy of camera pose tracking in recovering the pitch and yaw components of general 6-DoF motion, we introduce IMU measurements as motion priors via pre-integration. To this end, a compact back-end is proposed for continuously updating the IMU bias and predicting the linear velocity, enabling an accurate motion prediction for camera pose tracking. The resulting system scales well with modern high-resolution event cameras and leads to better global positioning accuracy in large-scale outdoor environments. Extensive evaluations on five publicly available datasets featuring different resolutions and scenarios justify the superior performance of the proposed system against five state-of-the-art methods.