1,664 research outputs found
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
High-Precision Localization Using Ground Texture
Location-aware applications play an increasingly critical role in everyday
life. However, satellite-based localization (e.g., GPS) has limited accuracy
and can be unusable in dense urban areas and indoors. We introduce an
image-based global localization system that is accurate to a few millimeters
and performs reliable localization both indoors and outside. The key idea is to
capture and index distinctive local keypoints in ground textures. This is based
on the observation that ground textures including wood, carpet, tile, concrete,
and asphalt may look random and homogeneous, but all contain cracks, scratches,
or unique arrangements of fibers. These imperfections are persistent, and can
serve as local features. Our system incorporates a downward-facing camera to
capture the fine texture of the ground, together with an image processing
pipeline that locates the captured texture patch in a compact database
constructed offline. We demonstrate the capability of our system to robustly,
accurately, and quickly locate test images on various types of outdoor and
indoor ground surfaces
Understanding the Limitations of CNN-based Absolute Camera Pose Regression
Visual localization is the task of accurate camera pose estimation in a known
scene. It is a key problem in computer vision and robotics, with applications
including self-driving cars, Structure-from-Motion, SLAM, and Mixed Reality.
Traditionally, the localization problem has been tackled using 3D geometry.
Recently, end-to-end approaches based on convolutional neural networks have
become popular. These methods learn to directly regress the camera pose from an
input image. However, they do not achieve the same level of pose accuracy as 3D
structure-based methods. To understand this behavior, we develop a theoretical
model for camera pose regression. We use our model to predict failure cases for
pose regression techniques and verify our predictions through experiments. We
furthermore use our model to show that pose regression is more closely related
to pose approximation via image retrieval than to accurate pose estimation via
3D structure. A key result is that current approaches do not consistently
outperform a handcrafted image retrieval baseline. This clearly shows that
additional research is needed before pose regression algorithms are ready to
compete with structure-based methods.Comment: Initial version of a paper accepted to CVPR 201
Increasing the Efficiency of 6-DoF Visual Localization Using Multi-Modal Sensory Data
Localization is a key requirement for mobile robot autonomy and human-robot
interaction. Vision-based localization is accurate and flexible, however, it
incurs a high computational burden which limits its application on many
resource-constrained platforms. In this paper, we address the problem of
performing real-time localization in large-scale 3D point cloud maps of
ever-growing size. While most systems using multi-modal information reduce
localization time by employing side-channel information in a coarse manner (eg.
WiFi for a rough prior position estimate), we propose to inter-weave the map
with rich sensory data. This multi-modal approach achieves two key goals
simultaneously. First, it enables us to harness additional sensory data to
localise against a map covering a vast area in real-time; and secondly, it also
allows us to roughly localise devices which are not equipped with a camera. The
key to our approach is a localization policy based on a sequential Monte Carlo
estimator. The localiser uses this policy to attempt point-matching only in
nodes where it is likely to succeed, significantly increasing the efficiency of
the localization process. The proposed multi-modal localization system is
evaluated extensively in a large museum building. The results show that our
multi-modal approach not only increases the localization accuracy but
significantly reduces computational time.Comment: Presented at IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots
(Humanoids) 201
From Coarse to Fine: Robust Hierarchical Localization at Large Scale
Robust and accurate visual localization is a fundamental capability for
numerous applications, such as autonomous driving, mobile robotics, or
augmented reality. It remains, however, a challenging task, particularly for
large-scale environments and in presence of significant appearance changes.
State-of-the-art methods not only struggle with such scenarios, but are often
too resource intensive for certain real-time applications. In this paper we
propose HF-Net, a hierarchical localization approach based on a monolithic CNN
that simultaneously predicts local features and global descriptors for accurate
6-DoF localization. We exploit the coarse-to-fine localization paradigm: we
first perform a global retrieval to obtain location hypotheses and only later
match local features within those candidate places. This hierarchical approach
incurs significant runtime savings and makes our system suitable for real-time
operation. By leveraging learned descriptors, our method achieves remarkable
localization robustness across large variations of appearance and sets a new
state-of-the-art on two challenging benchmarks for large-scale localization.Comment: Camera-ready for CVPR 201
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