2,713 research outputs found
Learning Local Feature Descriptor with Motion Attribute for Vision-based Localization
In recent years, camera-based localization has been widely used for robotic
applications, and most proposed algorithms rely on local features extracted
from recorded images. For better performance, the features used for open-loop
localization are required to be short-term globally static, and the ones used
for re-localization or loop closure detection need to be long-term static.
Therefore, the motion attribute of a local feature point could be exploited to
improve localization performance, e.g., the feature points extracted from
moving persons or vehicles can be excluded from these systems due to their
unsteadiness. In this paper, we design a fully convolutional network (FCN),
named MD-Net, to perform motion attribute estimation and feature description
simultaneously. MD-Net has a shared backbone network to extract features from
the input image and two network branches to complete each sub-task. With
MD-Net, we can obtain the motion attribute while avoiding increasing much more
computation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can
learn distinct local feature descriptor along with motion attribute only using
an FCN, by outperforming competing methods by a wide margin. We also show that
the proposed algorithm can be integrated into a vision-based localization
algorithm to improve estimation accuracy significantly.Comment: This paper will be presented on IROS1
Leveraging Deep Visual Descriptors for Hierarchical Efficient Localization
Many robotics applications require precise pose estimates despite operating
in large and changing environments. This can be addressed by visual
localization, using a pre-computed 3D model of the surroundings. The pose
estimation then amounts to finding correspondences between 2D keypoints in a
query image and 3D points in the model using local descriptors. However,
computational power is often limited on robotic platforms, making this task
challenging in large-scale environments. Binary feature descriptors
significantly speed up this 2D-3D matching, and have become popular in the
robotics community, but also strongly impair the robustness to perceptual
aliasing and changes in viewpoint, illumination and scene structure. In this
work, we propose to leverage recent advances in deep learning to perform an
efficient hierarchical localization. We first localize at the map level using
learned image-wide global descriptors, and subsequently estimate a precise pose
from 2D-3D matches computed in the candidate places only. This restricts the
local search and thus allows to efficiently exploit powerful non-binary
descriptors usually dismissed on resource-constrained devices. Our approach
results in state-of-the-art localization performance while running in real-time
on a popular mobile platform, enabling new prospects for robotics research.Comment: CoRL 2018 Camera-ready (fix typos and update citations
Semantic Visual Localization
Robust visual localization under a wide range of viewing conditions is a
fundamental problem in computer vision. Handling the difficult cases of this
problem is not only very challenging but also of high practical relevance,
e.g., in the context of life-long localization for augmented reality or
autonomous robots. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on a joint
3D geometric and semantic understanding of the world, enabling it to succeed
under conditions where previous approaches failed. Our method leverages a novel
generative model for descriptor learning, trained on semantic scene completion
as an auxiliary task. The resulting 3D descriptors are robust to missing
observations by encoding high-level 3D geometric and semantic information.
Experiments on several challenging large-scale localization datasets
demonstrate reliable localization under extreme viewpoint, illumination, and
geometry changes
Don't Look Back: Robustifying Place Categorization for Viewpoint- and Condition-Invariant Place Recognition
When a human drives a car along a road for the first time, they later
recognize where they are on the return journey typically without needing to
look in their rear-view mirror or turn around to look back, despite significant
viewpoint and appearance change. Such navigation capabilities are typically
attributed to our semantic visual understanding of the environment [1] beyond
geometry to recognizing the types of places we are passing through such as
"passing a shop on the left" or "moving through a forested area". Humans are in
effect using place categorization [2] to perform specific place recognition
even when the viewpoint is 180 degrees reversed. Recent advances in deep neural
networks have enabled high-performance semantic understanding of visual places
and scenes, opening up the possibility of emulating what humans do. In this
work, we develop a novel methodology for using the semantics-aware higher-order
layers of deep neural networks for recognizing specific places from within a
reference database. To further improve the robustness to appearance change, we
develop a descriptor normalization scheme that builds on the success of
normalization schemes for pure appearance-based techniques such as SeqSLAM [3].
Using two different datasets - one road-based, one pedestrian-based, we
evaluate the performance of the system in performing place recognition on
reverse traversals of a route with a limited field of view camera and no
turn-back-and-look behaviours, and compare to existing state-of-the-art
techniques and vanilla off-the-shelf features. The results demonstrate
significant improvements over the existing state of the art, especially for
extreme perceptual challenges that involve both great viewpoint change and
environmental appearance change. We also provide experimental analyses of the
contributions of the various system components.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, ICRA 201
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