Automatic Visual Bag-of-Words for Online Robot Navigation and Mapping

作者：Nicosevici Tudor^*; Garcia Rafael

来源：IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2012, 28(4): 886-898.

DOI：10.1109/TRO.2012.2192013

• Field robots
• localization
• loop-closure
• mapping
• simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)

Detecting already-visited regions based on their visual appearance helps reduce drift and position uncertainties in robot navigation and mapping. Inspired from content-based image retrieval, an efficient approach is the use of visual vocabularies to measure similarities between images. This way, images corresponding to the same scene region can be associated. State-of-theart proposals that address this topic use prebuilt vocabularies that generally require a priori knowledge of the environment. We propose a novel method for appearance-based navigation and mapping where the visual vocabularies are built online, thus eliminating the need for prebuilt data. We also show that the proposed technique allows efficient loop-closure detection, even at small vocabulary sizes, resulting in a higher computational efficiency.

• 出版日期2012-8