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Self-Supervised Feature Learning for Long-Term Metric Visual Localization

Robotics 2022-12-02 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.00122,
  title  = {Self-Supervised Feature Learning for Long-Term Metric Visual Localization},
  author = {Yuxuan Chen and Timothy D. Barfoot},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.00122},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

IEEE RA-L 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:18:46.495Z