We present a challenging new dataset for autonomous driving: the Oxford RobotCar Dataset. Over the period of May 2014 to December 2015 we traversed a route through central Oxford twice a week on average using the Oxford RobotCar platform, an autonomous Nissan LEAF. This resulted in over 1000km of recorded driving with almost 20 million images collected from 6 cameras mounted to the vehicle, along with LIDAR, GPS and INS ground truth. Data was collected in all weather conditions, including heavy rain, night, direct sunlight and snow. Road and building works over the period of a year significantly changed sections of the route from the beginning to the end of data collection. By frequently traversing the same route over the period of a year we enable research investigating long-term localisation and mapping for autonomous vehicles in real-world, dynamic urban environments. The full dataset is available for download at: http://robotcar-dataset.robots.ox.ac.uk
This paper is about camera-only localisation in challenging outdoor environments, where changes in lighting, weather and season cause traditional localisation systems to fail. Conventional approaches to the localisation problem rely on point-features such as SIFT, SURF or BRIEF to associate landmark observations in the live image with landmarks stored in the map; however, these features are brittle to the severe appearance change routinely encountered in outdoor environments. In this paper, we propose an alternative to traditional point-features: we train place-specific linear SVM classifiers to recognise distinctive elements in the environment. The core contribution of this paper is an unsupervised mining algorithm which operates on a single mapping dataset to extract distinct elements from the environment for localisation. We evaluate our system on 205 km of data collected from central Oxford over a period of six months in bright sun, night, rain, snow and at all times of the day. Our experiment consists of a comprehensive N-vs-N analysis on 22 laps of the approximately 10 km route in central Oxford. With our proposed system, the portion of the route where localisation fails is reduced by a factor of 6, from 33.3% to 5.5%.
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