Visual Localization in Changing Environments using Place Recognition Techniques

Abstract

This paper proposes a visual localization system combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and sparse point features to estimate the 6-DOF pose of the robot. The challenges of visual localization across time lie in that the same place captured across time appears dramatically different due to different illumination and weather conditions, viewpoint variations and dynamic objects. In this paper, a novel CNN-based place recognition approach is proposed, which requires no time-consuming feature generation process and no task-specific training. Moreover, we demonstrate that the rich semantic context information obtained from place recognition can greatly improve the subsequent feature matching process for pose estimation. The semantic constraint performs much better than traditional Bag-of-Words based methods for establishing correspondences between the query image and the map. To evaluate the robustness of the algorithm, the proposed system is integrated into ORB-SLAM2 and verified on the data collected over various illumination and weather conditions. Extensive experimental results show that even with weak ORB descriptors, the proposed system can significantly improve the success rate of localization under severe appearance changes.