OpenVINS Mobile - Android Application

This folder contains the android application that allows for running of OpenVINS on an Android phone. We leverage the Android NDK to allow for building of our C++ project directly in the toolchain. If you want to use this application, open it up in Android Studio Otter | 2025.2.1. You might need to use SDK manager to install CMake 3.18.1. We use the Camera2 api to get the camera information from android and then pipe that into c++ via a JNI interfance. Once in c++ we have a second background thread which is consuming the images and pushing to the VioManager directly.

Screen_Recording_20251116_200504_open_vins_android_compressed.mp4

Getting Started

1. Clone this repository: git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/goldbattle/open_vins_mobile.git
   • OpenVINS will be located in app/src/main/cpp/open_vins/
   • The native code which passes information into OpenVINS is native-lib.cpp
2. Open the cloned folder in Android Studio and "run" / build it and install it on your device
   • This will build both the OpenVINS c++ library, but also the Kotlin java component of it
   • As a post step, all the things in app_device/ are copied to the private app folder
   • This is where you will update the calibration / yaml config for OpenVINS for the device
3. You will need to first perform calibration of your device
   • Follow the guide in app_kalibr/.
   • You should be able to use the app to record a dataset to disk via the "save" icon
   • Perform the calibration, and update your device calibration app_device/
4. You should now be able to click the "play" button and be able to run OpenVINS

OpenVINS Submodule

You will either need to clone recursively to get the submodule or pull it after. For example do the following to get the OpenVINS repo. The main submodule is located in app/src/main/cpp/OpenVINS.

# clone with the submodule
git clone --recurse-submodules <repo_url>
# if you did not pull during clone
git submodule update --init --recursive

References

• Core Android Development
  • Android NDK toolset -- https://developer.android.com/ndk
  • Android Camera2 API -- https://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/camera2/package-summary
  • Camera2 API Guide -- https://developer.android.com/training/camera2
  • CMake for Android -- https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/cmake
  • Kotlin Programming Language -- https://kotlinlang.org/docs/home.html
• Third-Party Libraries
  • Guide to using OpenCV on android -- https://github.com/VlSomers/native-opencv-android-template
  • OpenCV Documentation -- https://docs.opencv.org/
  • Boost for Android -- https://github.com/dec1/Boost-for-Android
  • Boost C++ Libraries -- https://www.boost.org/
  • Eigen3 Linear Algebra Library -- https://eigen.tuxfamily.org/
• Examples and Tutorials
  • JavaCameraView Example -- https://answers.opencv.org/question/19796/android-use-autofocus-with-camerabridgeviewbase/#19813

Credit / Licensing

For researchers that have leveraged or compared to this work, please cite the following:

@Conference{Geneva2020ICRA,
  Title      = {{OpenVINS}: A Research Platform for Visual-Inertial Estimation},
  Author     = {Patrick Geneva and Kevin Eckenhoff and Woosik Lee and Yulin Yang and Guoquan Huang},
  Booktitle  = {Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
  Year       = {2020},
  Address    = {Paris, France},
  Url        = {\url{https://github.com/rpng/open_vins}}
}

OpenVINS is license under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPL-3), please checkout its LICENSE. This mobile code codebase and native code is also licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPL-3). You must preserve the copyright and license notices in your derivative work and make available the complete source code with modifications under the same license (see this; this is not legal advice).