2022/11/30 by Yuxuan Chen, Chen, Yuxuan, Timothy D. Barfoot +1
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Robotics (cs.RO) #Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.00122
openalex publication_date 2022/11/30 · openalex created_date 2022/12/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Visual localization is the task of estimating camera pose in a known scene, which is an essential problem in robotics and computer vision. However, long-term visual localization is still a challenge due to the environmental appearance changes caused by lighting and seasons. While techniques exist to address appearance changes using neural networks, these methods typically require ground-truth pose information to generate accurate image correspondences or act as a supervisory signal during training. In this paper, we present a novel self-supervised feature learning framework for metric visual localization. We use a sequence-based image matching algorithm across different sequences of images (i.e., experiences) to generate image correspondences without ground-truth labels. We can then sample image pairs to train a deep neural network that learns sparse features with associated descriptors and scores without ground-truth pose supervision. The learned features can be used together with a classical pose estimator for visual stereo localization. We validate the learned features by integrating with an existing Visual Teach & Repeat pipeline to perform closed-loop localization experiments under different lighting conditions for a total of 22.4 km.