We present a new method to localize a camera within a previously unseen environment perceived from an egocentric point of view. Although this is, in general, an ill-posed problem, humans can effortlessly and efficiently determine their relative location and orientation and navigate into a previously unseen environments, e.g., finding a specific item in a new grocery store. To enable such a capability, we design a new egocentric representation, which we call ECO (Egocentric COgnitive map). ECO is biologically inspired, by the cognitive map that allows human navigation, and it encodes the surrounding visual semantics with respect to both distance and orientation. ECO possesses three main properties: (1) reconfigurability: complex semantics and geometry is captured via the synthesis of atomic visual representations (e.g., image patch); (2) robustness: the visual semantics are registered in a geometrically consistent way (e.g., aligning with respect to the gravity vector, frontalizing, and rescaling to canonical depth), thus enabling us to learn meaningful atomic representations; (3) adaptability: a domain adaptation framework is designed to generalize the learned representation without manual calibration. As a proof-of-concept, we use ECO to localize a camera within real-world scenes---various grocery stores---and demonstrate performance improvements when compared to existing semantic localization approaches.
We present a robust and real-time monocular six degree of freedom relocalization system. Our system trains a convolutional neural network to regress the 6-DOF camera pose from a single RGB image in an end-to-end manner with no need of additional engineering or graph optimisation. The algorithm can operate indoors and outdoors in real time, taking 5ms per frame to compute. It obtains approximately 2m and 6 degree accuracy for large scale outdoor scenes and 0.5m and 10 degree accuracy indoors. This is achieved using an efficient 23 layer deep convnet, demonstrating that convnets can be used to solve complicated out of image plane regression problems. This was made possible by leveraging transfer learning from large scale classification data. We show the convnet localizes from high level features and is robust to difficult lighting, motion blur and different camera intrinsics where point based SIFT registration fails. Furthermore we show how the pose feature that is produced generalizes to other scenes allowing us to regress pose with only a few dozen training examples. PoseNet code, dataset and an online demonstration is available on our project webpage, at this http URL We present a system that can reconstruct 3D geometry from large, unorganized collections of photographs such as those found by searching for a given city (e.g., Rome) on Internet photo-sharing sites. Our system is built on a set of new, distributed computer vision algorithms for image matching and 3D reconstruction, designed to maximize parallelism at each stage of the pipeline and to scale gracefully with both the size of the problem and the amount of available computation. Our experimental results demonstrate that it is now possible to reconstruct city-scale image collections with more than a hundred thousand images in less than a day. This paper introduces an approach for dense 3D reconstruction from unregistered Internet-scale photo collections with about 3 million images within the span of a day on a single PC ("cloudless"). Our method advances image clustering, stereo, stereo fusion and structure from motion to achieve high computational performance. We leverage geometric and appearance constraints to obtain a highly parallel implementation on modern graphics processors and multi-core architectures. This leads to two orders of magnitude higher performance on an order of magnitude larger dataset than competing state-of-the-art approaches. While navigating in an environment, a vision system has to be able to recognize where it is and what the main objects in the scene are. We present a context-based vision system for place and object recognition. The goal is to identify familiar locations (e.g., office 610, conference room 941, main street), to categorize new environments (office, corridor, street) and to use that information to provide contextual priors for object recognition (e.g., tables are more likely in an office than a street). We present a low-dimensional global image representation that provides relevant information for place recognition and categorization, and show how such contextual information introduces strong priors that simplify object recognition. We have trained the system to recognize over 60 locations (indoors and outdoors) and to suggest the presence and locations of more than 20 different object types. The algorithm has been integrated into a mobile system that provides realtime feedback to the user. We have previously developed a mobile robot system which uses scale invariant visual landmarks to localize and simultaneously build a 3D map of the environment In this paper, we look at global localization, also known as the kidnapped robot problem, where the robot localizes itself globally, without any prior location estimate. This is achieved by matching distinctive landmarks in the current frame to a database map. A Hough transform approach and a random sample consensus (RANSAC) approach for global localization are compared, showing that RANSAC is much more efficient. Moreover, robust global localization can be achieved by matching a small sub-map of the local region built from multiple frames. Deep learning has shown to be effective for robust and real-time monocular image relocalisation. In particular, PoseNet [22] is a deep convolutional neural network which learns to regress the 6-DOF camera pose from a single image. It learns to localize using high level features and is robust to difficult lighting, motion blur and unknown camera intrinsics, where point based SIFT registration fails. However, it was trained using a naive loss function, with hyper-parameters which require expensive tuning. In this paper, we give the problem a more fundamental theoretical treatment. We explore a number of novel loss functions for learning camera pose which are based on geometry and scene reprojection error. Additionally we show how to automatically learn an optimal weighting to simultaneously regress position and orientation. By leveraging geometry, we demonstrate that our technique significantly improves PoseNets performance across datasets ranging from indoor rooms to a small city.  A common thread that ties together many prior works in scene understanding is their focus on the aspects directly present in a scene such as its categorical classification or the set of objects. In this work, we propose to look beyond the visible elements of a scene; we demonstrate that a scene is not just a collection of objects and their configuration or the labels assigned to its pixels - it is so much more. From a simple observation of a scene, we can tell a lot about the environment surrounding the scene such as the potential establishments near it, the potential crime rate in the area, or even the economic climate. Here, we explore several of these aspects from both the human perception and computer vision perspective. Specifically, we show that it is possible to predict the distance of surrounding establishments such as McDonald's or hospitals even by using scenes located far from them. We go a step further to show that both humans and computers perform well at navigating the environment based only on visual cues from scenes. Lastly, we show that it is possible to predict the crime rates in an area simply by looking at a scene without any real-time criminal activity. Simply put, here, we illustrate that it is possible to look beyond the visible scene.  We describe the prototype of a system intended to allow a userto navigate in an urban environment using a mobile telephone equipped wi th a camera. The system uses a database of views of building facades to det ermine the pose of a query view provided by the user. Our method is based o n a novel wide-baseline matching algorithm that can identify corres ponding building facades in two views despite significant changes of viewpoin t and lighting. We show that our system is capable of localising query views r eliably in a large part of Cambridge city centre.