BIEVR-LIO: Robust LiDAR-Inertial Odometry through Bump-Image-Enhanced Voxel Maps

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pfreundschuh, Patrick, Tuna, Turcan, Gentil, Cedric Le, Siegwart, Roland, Cadena, Cesar, Oleynikova, Helen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Pfreundschuh, Patrick
Tuna, Turcan
Gentil, Cedric Le
Siegwart, Roland
Cadena, Cesar
Oleynikova, Helen
author_facet Pfreundschuh, Patrick
Tuna, Turcan
Gentil, Cedric Le
Siegwart, Roland
Cadena, Cesar
Oleynikova, Helen
contents Reliable odometry is essential for mobile robots as they increasingly enter more challenging environments, which often contain little information to constrain point cloud registration, resulting in degraded LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) accuracy or even divergence. To address this, we present BIEVR-LIO, a novel approach designed specifically to exploit subtle variations in the available geometry for improved robustness. We propose a high-resolution map representation that stores surfaces as compact voxel-wise oriented height images. This representation can directly be used for registration without the calculation of intermediate geometric primitives while still supporting efficient updates. Since informative geometry is often sparsely distributed in the environment, we further propose a map-informed point sampling strategy to focus registration on geometrically informative regions, improving robustness in uninformative environments while reducing computational cost compared to global high-resolution sampling. Experiments across multiple sensors, platforms, and environments demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in well-constrained scenes and substantial improvements in challenging scenarios where baseline methods diverge. Additionally, we demonstrate that the fine-grained geometry captured by BIEVR-LIO can be used for downstream tasks such as elevation mapping for robot locomotion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_14421
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BIEVR-LIO: Robust LiDAR-Inertial Odometry through Bump-Image-Enhanced Voxel Maps
Pfreundschuh, Patrick
Tuna, Turcan
Gentil, Cedric Le
Siegwart, Roland
Cadena, Cesar
Oleynikova, Helen
Robotics
Reliable odometry is essential for mobile robots as they increasingly enter more challenging environments, which often contain little information to constrain point cloud registration, resulting in degraded LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) accuracy or even divergence. To address this, we present BIEVR-LIO, a novel approach designed specifically to exploit subtle variations in the available geometry for improved robustness. We propose a high-resolution map representation that stores surfaces as compact voxel-wise oriented height images. This representation can directly be used for registration without the calculation of intermediate geometric primitives while still supporting efficient updates. Since informative geometry is often sparsely distributed in the environment, we further propose a map-informed point sampling strategy to focus registration on geometrically informative regions, improving robustness in uninformative environments while reducing computational cost compared to global high-resolution sampling. Experiments across multiple sensors, platforms, and environments demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in well-constrained scenes and substantial improvements in challenging scenarios where baseline methods diverge. Additionally, we demonstrate that the fine-grained geometry captured by BIEVR-LIO can be used for downstream tasks such as elevation mapping for robot locomotion.
title BIEVR-LIO: Robust LiDAR-Inertial Odometry through Bump-Image-Enhanced Voxel Maps
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14421