Title
Binary Neural Networks for Memory-Efficient and Effective Visual Place Recognition in Changing Environments
Abstract
Visual place recognition (VPR) is a robot’s ability to determine whether a place was visited before using visual data. While conventional handcrafted methods for VPR fail under extreme environmental appearance changes, those based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance but result in heavy runtime processes and model sizes that demand a large amount of memory. Hence, CNN-based approaches are unsuitable for resource-constrained platforms, such as small robots and drones. In this article, we take a multistep approach of decreasing the precision of model parameters, combining it with network depth reduction and fewer neurons in the classifier stage to propose a new class of highly compact models that drastically reduces the memory requirements and computational effort while maintaining state-of-the-art VPR performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose binary neural networks for solving the VPR problem effectively under changing conditions and with significantly reduced resource requirements. Our best-performing binary neural network, dubbed FloppyNet, achieves comparable VPR performance when considered against its full-precision and deeper counterparts while consuming 99% less memory and increasing the inference speed by seven times.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TRO.2022.3148908
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Binary neural networks,localization,visual-based navigation
Journal
38
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1552-3098
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
18
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
bruno ferrarini132.08
Michael Milford2122184.09
Klaus D. McDonald-Maier332754.43
Shoaib Ehsan411024.43