PoGO-Net: Pose Graph Optimization With Graph Neural Networks

Xinyi Li, Haibin Ling; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 5895-5905

Accurate camera pose estimation or global camera re-localization is a core component in Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and SLAM systems. Given pair-wise relative camera poses, pose-graph optimization (PGO) involves solving for an optimized set of globally-consistent absolute camera poses. In this work, we propose a novel PGO scheme fueled by graph neural networks (GNN), namely PoGO-Net, to conduct the absolute camera pose regression leveraging multiple rotation averaging (MRA). Specifically, PoGO-Net takes a noisy view-graph as the input, where the nodes and edges are designed to encode the geometric constraints and local graph consistency. Besides, we address the outlier edge removal by exploiting an implicit edge-dropping scheme where the noisy or corrupted edges are effectively filtered out with parameterized networks. Furthermore, we introduce a joint loss function embedding MRA formulation such that the robust inference is capable of achieving real-time performances even for large-scale scenes. Our proposed network is trained end-to-end on public benchmarks, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in extensive experiments that demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our proposed network.