  Monocular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is a low-cost solution to provide
high-accuracy, low-drifting pose estimation. However, it has been meeting
challenges in vehicular scenarios due to limited dynamics and lack of stable
features. In this paper, we propose Ground-VIO, which utilizes ground features
and the specific camera-ground geometry to enhance monocular VIO performance in
realistic road environments. In the method, the camera-ground geometry is
modeled with vehicle-centered parameters and integrated into an
optimization-based VIO framework. These parameters could be calibrated online
and simultaneously improve the odometry accuracy by providing stable
scale-awareness. Besides, a specially designed visual front-end is developed to
stably extract and track ground features via the inverse perspective mapping
(IPM) technique. Both simulation tests and real-world experiments are conducted
to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that our
implementation could dramatically improve monocular VIO accuracy in vehicular
scenarios, achieving comparable or even better performance than state-of-art
stereo VIO solutions. The system could also be used for the auto-calibration of
IPM which is widely used in vehicle perception. A toolkit for ground feature
processing, together with the experimental datasets, would be made open-source
(https://github.com/GREAT-WHU/gv_tools).
