Data-Efficient Decentralized Visual SLAM

Decentralized visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a powerful tool for multi-robot applications in environments where absolute positioning systems are not available. Being visual, it relies on cameras, cheap, lightweight and versatile sensors, and being decentralized, it does not rely on communication to a central ground station. In this work, we integrate state-of-the-art decentralized SLAM components into a new, complete decentralized visual SLAM system. To allow for data association and co-optimization, existing decentralized visual SLAM systems regularly exchange the full map data between all robots, incurring large data transfers at a complexity that scales quadratically with the robot count. In contrast, our method performs efficient data association in two stages: in the first stage a compact full-image descriptor is deterministically sent to only one robot. In the second stage, which is only executed if the first stage succeeded, the data required for relative pose estimation is sent, again to only one robot. Thus, data association scales linearly with the robot count and uses highly compact place representations. For optimization, a state-of-the-art decentralized pose-graph optimization method is used. It exchanges a minimum amount of data which is linear with trajectory overlap. We characterize the resulting system and identify bottlenecks in its components. The system is evaluated on publicly available data and we provide open access to the code.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to ICRA 201

Hybrid Scene Compression for Visual Localization

Localizing an image wrt. a 3D scene model represents a core task for many computer vision applications. An increasing number of real-world applications of visual localization on mobile devices, e.g., Augmented Reality or autonomous robots such as drones or self-driving cars, demand localization approaches to minimize storage and bandwidth requirements. Compressing the 3D models used for localization thus becomes a practical necessity. In this work, we introduce a new hybrid compression algorithm that uses a given memory limit in a more effective way. Rather than treating all 3D points equally, it represents a small set of points with full appearance information and an additional, larger set of points with compressed information. This enables our approach to obtain a more complete scene representation without increasing the memory requirements, leading to a superior performance compared to previous compression schemes. As part of our contribution, we show how to handle ambiguous matches arising from point compression during RANSAC. Besides outperforming previous compression techniques in terms of pose accuracy under the same memory constraints, our compression scheme itself is also more efficient. Furthermore, the localization rates and accuracy obtained with our approach are comparable to state-of-the-art feature-based methods, while using a small fraction of the memory.Comment: Published at CVPR 201

ExMaps: Long-Term Localization in Dynamic Scenes using Exponential Decay

Visual camera localization using offline maps is widespread in robotics and mobile applications. Most state-of-the-art localization approaches assume static scenes, so maps are often reconstructed once and then kept constant. However, many scenes are dynamic and as changes in the scene happen, future localization attempts may struggle or fail entirely. Therefore, it is important for successful long-term localization to update and maintain maps as new observations of the scene, and changes in it, arrive. We propose a novel method for automatically discovering which points in a map remain stable over time, and which are due to transient changes. To this end, we calculate a stability store for each point based on its visibility over time, weighted by an exponential decay over time. This allows us to consider the impact of time when scoring points, and to distinguish which points are useful for long-term localization. We evaluate our method on the CMU Extended Seasons dataset (outdoors) and a new indoor dataset of a retail shop, and show the benefit of maintaining a ‘live map’ that integrates updates over time using our exponential decay based method over a static ‘base map’

ExMaps: Long-Term Localization in Dynamic Scenes using Exponential Decay

Visual camera localization using offline maps is widespread in robotics and mobile applications. Most state-of-the-art localization approaches assume static scenes, so maps are often reconstructed once and then kept constant. However, many scenes are dynamic and as changes in the scene happen, future localization attempts may struggle or fail entirely. Therefore, it is important for successful long-term localization to update and maintain maps as new observations of the scene, and changes in it, arrive. We propose a novel method for automatically discovering which points in a map remain stable over time, and which are due to transient changes. To this end, we calculate a stability store for each point based on its visibility over time, weighted by an exponential decay over time. This allows us to consider the impact of time when scoring points, and to distinguish which points are useful for long-term localization. We evaluate our method on the CMU Extended Seasons dataset (outdoors) and a new indoor dataset of a retail shop, and show the benefit of maintaining a ‘live map’ that integrates updates over time using our exponential decay based method over a static ‘base map’