Wavelet Transform-Based Inertial Neural Network for Spatial Positioning Using Inertial Measurement Units

Abstract

As the demand for spatial positioning continues to grow, positioning methods based on inertial measurement units (IMUs) are emerging as a promising research topic due to their low cost and robustness against environmental interference. These methods are particularly well suited for global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-denied environments and challenging visual scenarios. While existing algorithms for position estimation using IMUs have demonstrated some effectiveness, there is still significant room for improvement in terms of estimation accuracy. Current approaches primarily treat IMU data as simple time series, neglecting the frequency-domain characteristics of IMU signals. This paper emphasizes the importance of frequency-domain information in IMU signals and proposes a novel neural network, WINNet (Wavelet Inertial Neural Network), which integrates time- and frequency-domain signals using a wavelet transform for spatial positioning with inertial sensors. Additionally, we collected ground-truth data using a LiDAR setup and combined it with the TLIO dataset to form a new IMU spatial positioning dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art inertial neural network algorithms in terms of the ATE, RTE, and drift error metrics overall.