Tight Learned Event-Inertial Odometry (TLEIO): a Transformer-Based Architecture for End-to-End Motion from Event Streams
Event cameras provide microsecond temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and sparse asynchronous measurements, making them compelling for odometry under fast motion and challenging illumination. Yet, accurate event-based state estimation remains difficult: existing systems often use events as a complement to frames or rely on feature tracking, correspondence search, and optimization-heavy backends, limiting the efficiency promised by event sensing. We introduce Tight Learned Event-Inertial Odometry (TLEIO), a compact filter-based pipeline that learns short-window relative motion directly from voxelized event streams and tightly fuses the resulting constraints with IMU propagation. Its learned front-end, EventsFormer, predicts local displacements and per-axis uncertainty from event voxels in a single forward pass, while a stochastic-cloning EKF fuses these overlapping predictions with IMU propagation, producing metric trajectories without explicit feature tracks and pose optimization at inference time. The network is trained directly from pose displacements, without requiring event-flow labels. We evaluate TLEIO on the TartanAir/TartanEvent benchmark and on real DAVIS240c sequences. On TartanAir, TLEIO reduces average ATE from 2.26 m to 1.10 m over the IMU-only TLIO baseline, while achieving up to 48.9% lower runtime than optimization-based event odometry methods.