ConvSequential-SLAM

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

Journal Article (2021)
Author(s)

Mihnea Alexandru Tomita (University of Essex)

M. Zaffar (TU Delft - Intelligent Vehicles)

Michael Milford (Queensland University of Technology)

Klaus D. McDonald-Maier (University of Essex)

Shoaib Ehsan (University of Essex)

Research Group
Intelligent Vehicles
Copyright
© 2021 Mihnea Alexandru Tomia, M. Zaffar, Michael J. Milford, Klaus D. McDonald-Maier, Shoaib Ehsan
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3107778
More Info
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Publication Year
2021
Language
English
Copyright
© 2021 Mihnea Alexandru Tomia, M. Zaffar, Michael J. Milford, Klaus D. McDonald-Maier, Shoaib Ehsan
Research Group
Intelligent Vehicles
Volume number
9
Pages (from-to)
118673-118683
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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.