Clean-room Citations & Provenance
Cortex has a strict no-GPL rule, including test oracles: every algorithm is
implemented clean-room from published papers and mathematical definitions, never
copied or adapted from GPL or otherwise restrictively-licensed source (in particular,
no ov_eval / OpenVINS / evo source contact for the metrics). This page is the
provenance record.
Provenance table
Section titled “Provenance table”| Component | Source(s) |
|---|---|
| MSCKF measurement model, null-space projection | Mourikis & Roumeliotis, “A Multi-State Constraint Kalman Filter for Vision-aided Inertial Navigation” (ICRA 2007) |
| Error-state propagation / indirect Kalman filter | Trawny & Roumeliotis, “Indirect Kalman Filter for 3D Attitude Estimation”; Solà, “Quaternion kinematics for the error-state Kalman filter” (2017) |
| IMU preintegration | Forster et al., “On-Manifold Preintegration for Real-Time Visual-Inertial Odometry” (RSS 2015 / T-RO 2017) |
| Dynamic visual-inertial initialization | Qin et al., “VINS-Mono” (T-RO 2018); Martinelli, “Closed-Form Solution of Visual-Inertial Structure from Motion” (IJCV 2014) |
| Lie groups (SO3/SE3/Sim3), Jacobians | Solà, Deray & Atchuthan, “A micro Lie theory for state estimation in robotics” (2018); Barfoot, “State Estimation for Robotics” |
| FAST corner detection | Rosten & Drummond, “Machine learning for high-speed corner detection” (ECCV 2006) |
| KLT tracking | Lucas & Kanade (1981); Bouguet, “Pyramidal Implementation of the Lucas-Kanade Feature Tracker” |
| Camera models | Brown–Conrady (radtan); Kannala & Brandt (equidistant fisheye, 2006); Mei & Rives (unified omnidirectional, 2007) |
| Trajectory alignment for ATE | Horn, “Closed-form solution of absolute orientation using unit quaternions” (JOSA-A 1987) |
| Symmetric eigendecomposition (Jacobi) | Golub & Van Loan, “Matrix Computations” (textbook cyclic Jacobi) |
| Non-linear least squares (GN / LM) | Nocedal & Wright, “Numerical Optimization”; Levenberg (1944); Marquardt (1963) |
License compatibility
Section titled “License compatibility”The third-party dependencies were audited up front (ADR-0001, third-party license
compatibility) and pulled in via CMake FetchContent: MTL5, Universal, yaml-cpp,
Catch2, Tracy, stb — all permissively licensed and compatible with the project’s
distribution model. The one standing exception to FetchContent is MLIR/LLVM (when
introduced), which is consumed as pre-built binaries.
Why this matters
Section titled “Why this matters”The clean-room discipline is what lets Cortex be delivered as OCI containers and a Yocto layer without license entanglement, and it’s why, for example, the ATE metric was re-derived from Horn’s paper (with a Jacobi eigensolver) rather than borrowed from an existing evaluation toolkit. When in doubt, the rule is: implement from the math, cite the paper, write the test oracle independently.