In this paper we present a novel approach to global localization using an RGB-D camera in maps of visual features. For large maps, the performance of pure image matching techniques decays in terms of robustness and computational cost. Particularly, repeated occurrences of similar features due to repeating structure in the world (e.g., doorways, chairs, etc.) or missing associations between observations pose critical challenges to visual localization. We address these challenges using a two-step approach. We first estimate a candidate pose using few correspondences between features of the current camera frame and the feature map. The initial set of correspondences is established by proximity in feature space. The initial pose estimate is used in the second step to guide spatial matching of features in 3D, i.e., searching for associations where the image features are expected to be found in the map. A RANSAC algorithm is used to compute a fine estimation of the pose from the correspondences. Our approach clearly outperforms localization based on feature matching exclusively in feature space, both in terms of estimation accuracy and robustness to failure and allows for global localization in real time (30Hz).
Zhang @cite_24 provide an uncertainty estimation of a 3D stereo-based localization approach using a correspondence-based method to estimate the robot pose. As in our work, visual features are extracted from the image and RANSAC is used to remove the outliers from the initial matches between features in two consecutive images. In contrast, our approach establishes correspondences by image-to-map matching. Thus, additional sources of false correspondences arise, such as repeated objects in the world, the presence of several features in the map extracted from the same point in the world, or the much larger number of features in the map, which increases the chance for random matches.
@cite_24
1541573393
Visual odometry is a popular approach to estimating robot motion using a monocular or stereo camera. This paper proposes a novel visual odometry scheme using a stereo camera for robust estimation of a 6 DOF motion in the dynamic environment. The false results of feature matching and the uncertainty of depth information provided by the camera can generate the outliers which deteriorate the estimation. The outliers are removed by analyzing the magnitude histogram of the motion vector of the corresponding features and the RANSAC algorithm. The features extracted from a dynamic object such as a human also makes the motion estimation inaccurate. To eliminate the effect of a dynamic object, several candidates of dynamic objects are generated by clustering the 3D position of features and each candidate is checked based on the standard deviation of features on whether it is a real dynamic object or not. The accuracy and practicality of the proposed scheme are verified by several experiments and comparisons with both IMU and wheel-based odometry. It is shown that the proposed scheme works well when wheel slip occurs or dynamic objects exist. Stereo camera is a very important sensor for mobile robot localization and mapping. Its consecutive images can be used to estimate the location of the robot with respect to its environment. This estimation will be fused with location estimates from other sensors for a globally optimal location estimate. In the data fusion context, it is important to compute the uncertainty of the stereo-based localization. In this paper, we propose an approach to obtain the uncertainty of localization when a correspondence-based method is used to estimate the robot pose. The computational complexity of this approach is O(n). Where n is the number of corresponding image points. Experimental results show that this approach is promising. This paper proposes an efficient mixture model for establishing robust point correspondences between two sets of points under multi-layer motion. Our algorithm starts by creating a set of putative correspondences which can contain a number of false correspondences, or outliers, in addition to the true correspondences (inliers). Next we solve for correspondence by interpolating a set of spatial transformations on the putative correspondence set based on a mixture model, which involves estimating a consensus of inlier points whose matching follows a non-parametric geometrical constraint. We formulate this as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation of a Bayesian model with hidden latent variables indicating whether matches in the putative set are outliers or inliers. We impose non-parametric geometrical constraints on the correspondence, as a prior distribution, in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). MAP estimation is performed by the EM algorithm which by also estimating the variance of the prior model (initialized to a large value) is able to obtain good estimates very quickly (e.g., avoiding many of the local minima inherent in this formulation). We further provide a fast implementation based on sparse approximation which can achieve a significant speed-up without much performance degradation. We illustrate the proposed method on 2D and 3D real images for sparse feature correspondence, as well as a public available dataset for shape matching. The quantitative results demonstrate that our method is robust to non-rigid deformation and multi-layer large discontinuous motion. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm, called vector field consensus, for establishing robust point correspondences between two sets of points. Our algorithm starts by creating a set of putative correspondences which can contain a very large number of false correspondences, or outliers, in addition to a limited number of true correspondences (inliers). Next, we solve for correspondence by interpolating a vector field between the two point sets, which involves estimating a consensus of inlier points whose matching follows a nonparametric geometrical constraint. We formulate this a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation of a Bayesian model with hidden latent variables indicating whether matches in the putative set are outliers or inliers. We impose nonparametric geometrical constraints on the correspondence, as a prior distribution, using Tikhonov regularizers in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. MAP estimation is performed by the EM algorithm which by also estimating the variance of the prior model (initialized to a large value) is able to obtain good estimates very quickly (e.g., avoiding many of the local minima inherent in this formulation). We illustrate this method on data sets in 2D and 3D and demonstrate that it is robust to a very large number of outliers (even up to 90 ). We also show that in the special case where there is an underlying parametric geometrical model (e.g., the epipolar line constraint) that we obtain better results than standard alternatives like RANSAC if a large number of outliers are present. This suggests a two-stage strategy, where we use our nonparametric model to reduce the size of the putative set and then apply a parametric variant of our approach to estimate the geometric parameters. Our algorithm is computationally efficient and we provide code for others to use it. In addition, our approach is general and can be applied to other problems, such as learning with a badly corrupted training data set.