Title
Appearance-based landmark selection for visual localization.
Abstract
Visual localization in outdoor environments is subject to varying appearance conditions rendering it difficult to match current camera images against a previously recorded map. Although it is possible to extend the respective maps to allow precise localization across a wide range of differing appearance conditions, these maps quickly grow in size and become impractical to handle on a mobile robotic platform. To address this problem, we present a landmark selection algorithm that exploits appearance co-observability for efficient visual localization in outdoor environments. Based on the appearance condition inferred from recently observed landmarks, a small fraction of landmarks useful under the current appearance condition is selected and used for localization. This allows to greatly reduce the bandwidth consumption between the mobile platform and a map backend in a shared-map scenario, and significantly lowers the demands on the computational resources on said mobile platform. We derive a landmark ranking function that exhibits high performance under vastly changing appearance conditions and is agnostic to the distribution of landmarks across the different map sessions. Furthermore, we relate and compare our proposed appearance-based landmark ranking function to popular ranking schemes from information retrieval, and validate our results on the challenging University of Michigan North Campus long-term vision and LIDAR data sets (NCLT), including an evaluation of the localization accuracy using ground-truth poses. In addition to that, we investigate the computational and bandwidth resource demands. Our results show that by selecting 20-30% of landmarks using our proposed approach, a similar localization performance as the baseline strategy using all landmarks is achieved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1002/rob.21870
JOURNAL OF FIELD ROBOTICS
Keywords
Field
DocType
landmark selection,long-term localization,multisession mapping,visual localization,wheeled robots
Computer vision,Visual localization,Appearance based,Artificial intelligence,Engineering,Landmark
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
36.0
6.0
1556-4959
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.41
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mathias Burki1262.66
Cesar Dario Cadena Lerma243730.12
Igor Gilitschenski37813.89
Roland Siegwart47640551.49
Juan I. Nieto593988.52