NeRF-VIO: Map-Based Visual-Inertial Odometry with Initialization Leveraging Neural Radiance Fields

A prior map serves as a foundational reference for localization in context-aware applications such as augmented reality (AR). Providing valuable contextual information about the environment, the prior map is a vital tool for mitigating drift. In this paper, we propose a map-based visual-inertial localization algorithm (NeRF-VIO) with initialization using neural radiance fields (NeRF). Our algorithm utilizes a multilayer perceptron model and redefines the loss function as the geodesic distance on \(SE(3)\), ensuring the invariance of the initialization model under a frame change within \(\mathfrak{se}(3)\). The evaluation demonstrates that our model outperforms existing NeRF-based initialization solution in both accuracy and efficiency. By integrating a two-stage update mechanism within a multi-state constraint Kalman filter (MSCKF) framework, the state of NeRF-VIO is constrained by both captured images from an onboard camera and rendered images from a pre-trained NeRF model. The proposed algorithm is validated using a real-world AR dataset, the results indicate that our two-stage update pipeline outperforms MSCKF across all data sequences.

@article{zhang2025_2503.07952,
  title={ NeRF-VIO: Map-Based Visual-Inertial Odometry with Initialization Leveraging Neural Radiance Fields },
  author={ Yanyu Zhang and Dongming Wang and Jie Xu and Mengyuan Liu and Pengxiang Zhu and Wei Ren },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.07952},
  year={ 2025 }
}