Detection-by-Localization: Maintenance-Free Change Object Detector

Recent researches demonstrate that self-localization performance is a very useful measure of likelihood-of-change (LoC) for change detection. In this paper, this "detection-by-localization" scheme is studied in a novel generalized task of object-level change detection. In our framework, a given query image is segmented into object-level subimages (termed "scene parts"), which are then converted to subimage-level pixel-wise LoC maps via the detection-by-localization scheme. Our approach models a self-localization system as a ranking function, outputting a ranked list of reference images, without requiring relevance score. Thanks to this new setting, we can generalize our approach to a broad class of self-localization systems. Our ranking based self-localization model allows to fuse self-localization results from different modalities via an unsupervised rank fusion derived from a field of multi-modal information retrieval (MMR).Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, Technical repor

LocNet: Global localization in 3D point clouds for mobile vehicles

Global localization in 3D point clouds is a challenging problem of estimating the pose of vehicles without any prior knowledge. In this paper, a solution to this problem is presented by achieving place recognition and metric pose estimation in the global prior map. Specifically, we present a semi-handcrafted representation learning method for LiDAR point clouds using siamese LocNets, which states the place recognition problem to a similarity modeling problem. With the final learned representations by LocNet, a global localization framework with range-only observations is proposed. To demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of our global localization system, KITTI dataset is employed for comparison with other algorithms, and also on our long-time multi-session datasets for evaluation. The result shows that our system can achieve high accuracy.Comment: 6 pages, IV 2018 accepte

Benchmarking 6DOF Outdoor Visual Localization in Changing Conditions

Visual localization enables autonomous vehicles to navigate in their surroundings and augmented reality applications to link virtual to real worlds. Practical visual localization approaches need to be robust to a wide variety of viewing condition, including day-night changes, as well as weather and seasonal variations, while providing highly accurate 6 degree-of-freedom (6DOF) camera pose estimates. In this paper, we introduce the first benchmark datasets specifically designed for analyzing the impact of such factors on visual localization. Using carefully created ground truth poses for query images taken under a wide variety of conditions, we evaluate the impact of various factors on 6DOF camera pose estimation accuracy through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art localization approaches. Based on our results, we draw conclusions about the difficulty of different conditions, showing that long-term localization is far from solved, and propose promising avenues for future work, including sequence-based localization approaches and the need for better local features. Our benchmark is available at visuallocalization.net.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2018 as a spotligh

Robust Place Recognition using an Imaging Lidar

We propose a methodology for robust, real-time place recognition using an imaging lidar, which yields image-quality high-resolution 3D point clouds. Utilizing the intensity readings of an imaging lidar, we project the point cloud and obtain an intensity image. ORB feature descriptors are extracted from the image and encoded into a bag-of-words vector. The vector, used to identify the point cloud, is inserted into a database that is maintained by DBoW for fast place recognition queries. The returned candidate is further validated by matching visual feature descriptors. To reject matching outliers, we apply PnP, which minimizes the reprojection error of visual features' positions in Euclidean space with their correspondences in 2D image space, using RANSAC. Combining the advantages from both camera and lidar-based place recognition approaches, our method is truly rotation-invariant and can tackle reverse revisiting and upside-down revisiting. The proposed method is evaluated on datasets gathered from a variety of platforms over different scales and environments. Our implementation is available at https://git.io/imaging-lidar-place-recognitionComment: ICRA 202