ConvSequential-SLAM

A Sequence-Based, Training-Less Visual Place Recognition Technique for Changing Environments

Journal Article (2021)
Author(s)

Mihnea Alexandru Tomia (University of Essex)

Mubariz Zaffar (TU Delft - Intelligent Vehicles)

Michael J. Milford (Queensland University of Technology)

Klaus D. McDonald-Maier (University of Essex)

Shoaib Ehsan (University of Essex)

Research Group
Intelligent Vehicles
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3107778 Final published version
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2021
Language
English
Research Group
Intelligent Vehicles
Volume number
9
Pages (from-to)
118673-118683
Downloads counter
227
Collections
Institutional Repository
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Abstract

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is the ability to correctly recall a previously visited place under changing viewpoints and appearances. A large number of handcrafted and deep-learning-based VPR techniques exist, where the former suffer from appearance changes and the latter have significant computational needs. In this paper, we present a new handcrafted VPR technique, namely ConvSequential-SLAM, that achieves state-of-the-art place matching performance under challenging conditions. We utilise sequential information and block-normalisation to handle appearance changes, while using regional-convolutional matching to achieve viewpoint-invariance. We analyse content-overlap in-between query frames to find a minimum sequence length, while also re-using the image entropy information for environment-based sequence length tuning. State-of-the-art performance is reported in contrast to 9 contemporary VPR techniques on 4 public datasets. Qualitative insights and an ablation study on sequence length are also provided.