Efficient Visual Place Recognition by Adaptive CNN Landmark Matching

Abstract

Visual place recognition (VPR) is a fundamental yet challenging task of mobile robot navigation and localization. The existing VPR methods are usually based on some pairwise similarity of image descriptors, so they are sensitive to visual appearance change and also computationally expensive. This paper proposes a simple yet effective four-step method that achieves adaptive convolutional neural network (CNN) landmark matching for VPR. First, based on the features extracted from existing CNN models, the regions with higher significance scores are selected as landmarks. Then, according to the coordinate positions of potential landmarks, landmark matching is improved by removing mismatched landmark pairs. Finally, considering the significance scores obtained in the first step, robust image retrieval is performed based on adaptive landmark matching, and it gives more weight to the landmark matching pairs with higher significance scores. To verify the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method, evaluations are conducted on standard benchmark datasets. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method reduces the feature representation space of place images by more than 75% with negligible loss in recognition precision. Also, it achieves a fast matching speed in similarity calculation, satisfying the real-time requirement.