DiffusionIMU: Diffusion-Based Inertial Navigation with Iterative Motion Refinement

Abstract

Inertial navigation enables self-contained localization using only Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs), making it widely applicable in various domains such as navigation, augmented reality, and robotics. However, existing methods suffer from drift accumulation due to the sensor noise and difficulty capturing long-range temporal dependencies, limiting their robustness and accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose DiffusionIMU, a novel diffusion-based framework for inertial navigation. DiffusionIMU enhances direct velocity regression from IMU data through an iterative generative denoising process, progressively refining motion state estimation. It integrates the noise-adaptive feature modulation for sensor variability handling, the feature alignment mechanism for representation consistency, and the diffusion-based temporal modeling to decrease accumulated drift. Experiments show that DiffusionIMU consistently outperforms existing methods, demonstrating superior generalization to unseen users while alleviating the impact of the sensor noise.