evalio 0.1.1

Evaluate Lidar-Inertial Odometry on public datasets

evalio

evalio is a tool for Evaluating Lidar-Inertial Odometry.

Specifically, it provides a common interface for connecting LIO datasets and LIO pipelines. This allows for easy addition of new datasets and pipelines, as well as a common location to evaluate them making benchmarks significantly easier to run. It features,

• No ROS dependency! (though it can still load rosbag datasets using the wonderful rosbags package)
• Easy to add new datasets and pipelines, see the example
• Unified representation of lidar scan, e.g. row (scan-line) major order, stamped at the start of the scan, point stamps are relative from the start of the scan.
• Download and manage datasets via the CLI interface
• Simple to use API for friction-free access to data
• Run pipelines via the CLI interface and yaml config files
• Compute statistics for resulting trajectory runs

Installation

evalio is available on PyPi, so simply install via your favorite python package manager,

uv add evalio      # uv
pip install evalio # pip

Usage

evalio can be used both as a python library and as a CLI for both datasets and pipelines.

Datasets

Once evalio is installed, datasets can be listed and downloaded via the CLI interface. For example, to list all datasets and then download a sequence from the hilti-2022 dataset,

evalio ls datasets
evalio download hilti_2022/basement_2

evalio downloads data to the EVALIO_DATA environment variable, or if unset to the local folder ./evalio_data. All the trajectories in a dataset can also be downloaded by using the wildcard hilti_2022/*, making sure to escape the asterisk as needed.

[!NOTE] Many datasets use gdown to download datasets from google drive. Unfortunately, this can occasionally be finicky due to google's download limits, however downloading cookies from your browser can often help.

Once downloaded, a trajectory can then be easily used in python,

from evalio.datasets import Hilti2022

# for all data
for mm in Hilti2022.basement_2:
    print(mm)

# for lidars
for scan in Hilti2022.basement_2.lidar():
    print(scan)

# for imu
for imu in Hilti2022.basement_2.imu():
    print(imu)

For example, you can easily get a single scan to plot a bird-eye view,

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# get the 10th scan
scan = Hilti2022.basement_2.get_one_lidar(10)
# always in row-major order, with stamp at start of scan
x = np.array([p.x for p in scan.points])
y = np.array([p.y for p in scan.points])
z = np.array([p.z for p in scan.points])
plt.scatter(x, y, c=z, s=1)
plt.axis('equal')
plt.show()

evalio also comes with a built wrapper for converting to rerun types,

import rerun as rr
from evalio.rerun import convert

rr.init("evalio")
rr.connect_tcp()
for scan in Hilti2022.basement_2.lidar():
    rr.set_time_seconds("timeline", seconds=scan.stamp.to_sec())
    rr.log("lidar", convert(scan, color=[255, 0, 255]))

[!NOTE]
To run the rerun visualization, rerun must be installed. This can be done by installing rerun-sdk or evalio[vis] from PyPi.

We recommend checking out the base dataset class for more information on how to interact with datasets.

Pipelines

The other half of evalio is the pipelines that can be run on various datasets. All pipelines and their parameters can be shown via,

evalio ls pipelines

For example, to run KissICP on a dataset,

evalio run -o results -d hilti_2022/basement_2 -p kiss

This will run the pipeline on the dataset and save the results to the results folder. The results can then be used to compute statistics on the trajectory,

evalio stats results

[!NOTE]
KissICP does poorly by default on hilti_2022/basement_2, due to the close range and large default voxel size. You can visualize this by adding -vvv to the run command to visualize the trajectory in rerun.

More complex experiments can be run, including varying pipeline parameters, via specifying a config file,

output_dir: ./results/

datasets:
  # Run on all of newer college trajectories
  - hilti_2022/*
  # Run on first 1000 scans of multi campus
  - name: multi_campus/ntu_day_01
    length: 1000

pipelines:
  # Run vanilla kiss with default parameters
  - kiss
  # Tweak kiss parameters
  - name: kiss_tweaked
    pipeline: kiss
    deskew: true
    # Some of these datasets need smaller voxel sizes
    sweep:
      voxel_size: [0.1, 0.5, 1.0]
      

This can then be run via

evalio run -c config.yml

That's about the gist of it! Try playing around the CLI interface to see what else is possible, such as a number of visualization options using rerun. Feel free to open an issue if you have any questions, suggestions, or problems.

It should also be mentioned, autocomplete can be installed via argcomplete,

evalio "$(register-python-argcomplete evalio)"

This is extra useful for specifying the datasets when downloading or running, as they can get particularly long.

Custom Datasets & Pipelines

We understand that using an internal or work-in-progress datasets and pipelines will often be needed, thus evalio has full support for this. As mentioned above, we recommend checking out our example for more information how to to do this (it's pretty easy!).

The TL;DR version, a custom dataset can be made via inheriting from the Dataset class in python only, and a custom pipeline from inheriting the Pipeline class in either C++ or python. These can then be made available to evalio via the EVALIO_CUSTOM env variable point to the python module that contains them.

We highly recommend making a PR to merge your custom datasets or pipelines into evalio once they are ready. This will make it more likely the community will use and cite your work, as well as increase the usefulness of evalio for everyone.

Building from Source

While we recommend simply installing the python package using your preferred python package manager (our is uv), we've attempted to make building from source as easy as possible. We generally build through scikit-core-build which provides a simple wrapper for building CMake projects as python packages. uv is our frontend of choice for this process, but it is also possible via pip

uv sync          # uv version
pip install -e . # pip version

Of course, building via the usual CMake way is also possible, with the only default dependency being Eigen3,

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

By default, all pipelines are not included due to their large dependencies. CMake will look for them in the cpp/bindings/pipelines-src directory. If you'd like to add them, simply run the clone_pipelines.sh script that will clone and patch them appropriately.

When these pipelines are included, the number of dependencies increases significantly, so have provided a docker image that includes all dependencies for building as well as a VSCode devcontainer configuration. When opening in VSCode, you'll automatically be prompted to open in this container.

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome! Feel free to open an issue, pull request, etc. We're happy to help you get started. The following are rough instructions for specifically adding additional datasets or pipelines.

Datasets

Datasets are easy to add, simply drop your file into the python/evalio/datasets folder, and add it into the init file.

Pipelines

If adding in a python pipeline, it's near identical to adding a dataset. Drop your file into the python/evalio/pipelines folder, and add it into the init file.

C++ pipelines are more involved (and probably worth the effort). Your header file belongs in the cpp/bindings/pipelines folder. To get it to build, make sure it's added to clone_pipelines.sh, the proper CMakeLists.txt, and the [bindings.h] header. Finally, make sure all dependencies are also added to the docker build script, found in the docker folder.