Hints on using the Kimera-VIO front end?

[toivo-he]

Hi, we want to do some research on accelerating factor graph optimization for SLAM, and are interested to see if we can use the front end in Kimera-VIO to extract features. I tried to look through some of the code, but it's not obvious to me how I could do this in a good way.

I see that GTSAM is used by both the front end and back end, so I guess that the front end creates GTSAM factors and hands them to the back end? Let's say that I want to run Kimera-VIO on an existing data set and export the GTSAM factors as they are delivered by the front end. Where do you think would be a good place in the code where I could try to add this kind of functionality?

Also, I know that there are some python bindings for Kimera but I haven't been able to figure out what they do or how to use them. Is something like this already exposed through the python bindings so that I can play around with it?

Thanks, Toivo