Mapping, Localization and Path Planning for Image-Based Navigation Using Visual Features and Map

Janine Thoma, Danda Pani Paudel, Ajad Chhatkuli, Thomas Probst, Luc Van Gool; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 7383-7391

Abstract


Building on progress in feature representations for image retrieval, image-based localization has seen a surge of research interest. Image-based localization has the advantage of being inexpensive and efficient, often avoiding the use of 3D metric maps altogether. That said, the need to maintain a large amount of reference images as an effective support of localization in a scene, nonetheless calls for them to be organized in a map structure of some kind. The problem of localization often arises as part of a navigation process. We are, therefore, interested in summarizing the reference images as a set of landmarks, which meet the requirements for image-based navigation. A contribution of this paper is to formulate such a set of requirements for the two sub-tasks involved: compact map construction and accurate self localization. These requirements are then exploited for compact map representation and accurate self-localization, using the framework of a network flow problem. During this process, we formulate the map construction and self-localization problems as convex quadratic and second-order cone programs, respectively. We evaluate our methods on publicly available indoor and outdoor datasets, where they outperform existing methods significantly.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Thoma_2019_CVPR,
author = {Thoma, Janine and Paudel, Danda Pani and Chhatkuli, Ajad and Probst, Thomas and Gool, Luc Van},
title = {Mapping, Localization and Path Planning for Image-Based Navigation Using Visual Features and Map},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2019}
}