6,197 research outputs found
Training a Convolutional Neural Network for Appearance-Invariant Place Recognition
Place recognition is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision,
and has become a key part in mobile robotics and autonomous driving
applications for performing loop closure in visual SLAM systems. Moreover, the
difficulty of recognizing a revisited location increases with appearance
changes caused, for instance, by weather or illumination variations, which
hinders the long-term application of such algorithms in real environments. In
this paper we present a convolutional neural network (CNN), trained for the
first time with the purpose of recognizing revisited locations under severe
appearance changes, which maps images to a low dimensional space where
Euclidean distances represent place dissimilarity. In order for the network to
learn the desired invariances, we train it with triplets of images selected
from datasets which present a challenging variability in visual appearance. The
triplets are selected in such way that two samples are from the same location
and the third one is taken from a different place. We validate our system
through extensive experimentation, where we demonstrate better performance than
state-of-art algorithms in a number of popular datasets
Deep Learning Features at Scale for Visual Place Recognition
The success of deep learning techniques in the computer vision domain has
triggered a range of initial investigations into their utility for visual place
recognition, all using generic features from networks that were trained for
other types of recognition tasks. In this paper, we train, at large scale, two
CNN architectures for the specific place recognition task and employ a
multi-scale feature encoding method to generate condition- and
viewpoint-invariant features. To enable this training to occur, we have
developed a massive Specific PlacEs Dataset (SPED) with hundreds of examples of
place appearance change at thousands of different places, as opposed to the
semantic place type datasets currently available. This new dataset enables us
to set up a training regime that interprets place recognition as a
classification problem. We comprehensively evaluate our trained networks on
several challenging benchmark place recognition datasets and demonstrate that
they achieve an average 10% increase in performance over other place
recognition algorithms and pre-trained CNNs. By analyzing the network responses
and their differences from pre-trained networks, we provide insights into what
a network learns when training for place recognition, and what these results
signify for future research in this area.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures. Accepted by International Conference on Robotics
and Automation (ICRA) 2017. This is the submitted version. The final
published version may be slightly differen
Feature Map Filtering: Improving Visual Place Recognition with Convolutional Calibration
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently been shown to excel at
performing visual place recognition under changing appearance and viewpoint.
Previously, place recognition has been improved by intelligently selecting
relevant spatial keypoints within a convolutional layer and also by selecting
the optimal layer to use. Rather than extracting features out of a particular
layer, or a particular set of spatial keypoints within a layer, we propose the
extraction of features using a subset of the channel dimensionality within a
layer. Each feature map learns to encode a different set of weights that
activate for different visual features within the set of training images. We
propose a method of calibrating a CNN-based visual place recognition system,
which selects the subset of feature maps that best encodes the visual features
that are consistent between two different appearances of the same location.
Using just 50 calibration images, all collected at the beginning of the current
environment, we demonstrate a significant and consistent recognition
improvement across multiple layers for two different neural networks. We
evaluate our proposal on three datasets with different types of appearance
changes - afternoon to morning, winter to summer and night to day.
Additionally, the dimensionality reduction approach improves the computational
processing speed of the recognition system.Comment: Accepted to the Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation
201
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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