Place recognition and loop closure detection are challenging for long-term visual navigation tasks. SeqSLAM is considered to be one of the most successful approaches to achieve long-term localization under varying environmental conditions and changing viewpoints. SeqSLAM uses a brute-force sequential matching method, which is computationally intensive. In this work, we introduce a multi-resolution sampling-based global visual place recognition method (MRS-VPR), which can significantly improve the matching efficiency and accuracy in sequential matching. The novelty of this method lies in the coarse-to-fine searching pipeline and a particle filter-based global sampling scheme, that can balance the matching efficiency and accuracy in the long-term navigation task. Moreover, our model works much better than SeqSLAM when the testing sequence is over a much smaller time scale than the reference sequence. Our experiments demonstrate that MRSVPR is efficient in locating short temporary trajectories within long-term reference ones without compromising on the accuracy compared to SeqSLAM.
Appearance changing under variant conditions leads to an unstable place recognition in SLAM frameworks. Traditional V-SLAM methods use BoW @cite_10 (vector of local handcrafted features) as the image descriptor, or rely on prior 3D maps for online matching @cite_16 , or use hierarchical BoW @cite_15 .
@cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_10
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An increasing number of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems are using appearance-based localization to improve the quality of pose estimates. However, with the growing time-spans and size of the areas we want to cover, appearance-based maps are often becoming too large to handle and are consisting of features that are not always reliable for localization purposes. This paper presents a method for selecting map features that are persistent over time and thus suited for long-term localization. Our methodology relies on a CNN classifier based on image patches and depth maps for recognizing which features are suitable for life-long matchability. Thus, the classifier not only considers the appearance of a feature but also takes into account its expected lifetime. As a result, our feature selection approach produces more compact maps with a high fraction of temporally-stable features compared to the current state-of-the-art, while rejecting unstable features that typically harm localization. Our approach is validated on indoor and outdoor datasets, that span over a period of several months. Traditional approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) rely on low-level geometric features such as points, lines, and planes. They are unable to assign semantic labels to landmarks observed in the environment. Furthermore, loop closure recognition based on low-level features is often viewpoint-dependent and subject to failure in ambiguous or repetitive environments. On the other hand, object recognition methods can infer landmark classes and scales, resulting in a small set of easily recognizable landmarks, ideal for view-independent unambiguous loop closure. In a map with several objects of the same class, however, a crucial data association problem exists. While data association and recognition are discrete problems usually solved using discrete inference, classical SLAM is a continuous optimization over metric information. In this paper, we formulate an optimization problem over sensor states and semantic landmark positions that integrates metric information, semantic information, and data associations, and decompose it into two interconnected problems: an estimation of discrete data association and landmark class probabilities, and a continuous optimization over the metric states. The estimated landmark and robot poses affect the association and class distributions, which in turn affect the robot-landmark pose optimization. The performance of our algorithm is demonstrated on indoor and outdoor datasets. Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) methods typically rely on handcrafted visual features or raw RGB values for establishing correspondences between images. These features, while suitable for sparse mapping, often lead to ambiguous matches at texture-less regions when performing dense reconstruction due to the aperture problem. In this work, we explore the use of learned features for the matching task in dense monocular reconstruction. We propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture along with a deeply supervised feature learning scheme for pixel-wise regression of visual descriptors from an image which are best suited for dense monocular SLAM. In particular, our learning scheme minimizes a multi-view matching cost-volume loss with respect to the regressed features at multiple stages within the network, for explicitly learning contextual features that are suitable for dense matching between images captured by a moving monocular camera along the epipolar line. We utilize the learned features from our model for depth estimation inside a real-time dense monocular SLAM framework, where photometric error is replaced by our learned descriptor error. Our evaluation on several challenging indoor scenes demonstrate greatly improved accuracy in dense reconstructions of the well celebrated dense SLAM systems like DTAM, without compromising their real-time performance. We describe a new formulation of appearance-only SLAM suitable for very large scale place recognition. The system navigates in the space of appearance, assigning each new observation to either a new or a previously visited location, without reference to metric position. The system is demonstrated performing reliable online appearance mapping and loop-closure detection over a 1000âkm trajectory, with mean filter update times of 14âms. The scalability of the system is achieved by defining a sparse approximation to the FAB-MAP model suitable for implementation using an inverted index. Our formulation of the problem is fully probabilistic and naturally incorporates robustness against perceptual aliasing. We also demonstrate that the approach substantially outperforms the standard term-frequency inverse-document-frequency (tf-idf) ranking measure. The 1000âkm data set comprising almost a terabyte of omni-directional and stereo imagery is available for use, and we hope that it will serve as a benchmark for future systems.