PedestrianDiffusion: Multimodal Generative Denoising and Dense State Estimation for Inertial Navigation
This work addresses the problem of accurate inertial navigation for consumer-grade MEMS devices, which is critical for pedestrian tracking in GPS-denied environments.
PedestrianDiffusion reformulates dense 6D state estimation for inertial navigation as a continuous conditional denoising process in the frequency domain, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks with unprecedented robustness to impulse perturbations and kinematic drift.
The accuracy of consumer-grade inertial navigation is bottlenecked by the stochastic noise of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Traditional deterministic neural architectures often succumb to ``estimation jittering,'' sacrificing high-frequency kinematic fidelity for numerical stability. We propose PedestrianDiffusion, a multimodal spectral-domain generative framework reformulating dense 6D state estimation as a continuous conditional denoising process. By operating in the frequency domain, our formulation bounds the spectral covariance, acting as a mathematical preconditioner to stabilize the reverse diffusion trajectory. Furthermore, we introduce a zero-shot semantic conditioning mechanism leveraging vision-language embeddings as categorical priors to generalize across heterogeneous sensor noise profiles. To address the computational intractability of generative tracking, we deploy a single-step deterministic probability flow ODE solver ($T=1$). This yields high-capacity asynchronous batch trajectory refinement, establishing the viability of generative architectures for asynchronous batch trajectory refinement on edge hardware. Extensive evaluations on the OxIOD, RIDI, RoNIN, and TLIO benchmarks demonstrate that PedestrianDiffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance, exhibiting unprecedented robustness to impulse perturbations and coupled 6D kinematic drift. This work provides a rigorous algorithmic blueprint for next-generation Neural Inertial Measurement Units (N-IMUs).