This web page gives a short overview of our novel appearance-based place recognition system for topological localization. The concept of topological localization was pioneered by Benjamin Kuipers in the late seventies. Topological localization algorithms are based on adjacency maps.
Nodes represent locations, while arcs represent the adjacency relationships between the locations.
The main challenge of topological localization consists of reliably performing place recognition. An ideal sensor for this task is an omnidirectional color camera, because it provides rich information about the environment and does not suffer as much from perceptual aliasing as do most other sensors. The information contained in a single panoramic color image is in most cases sufficient to reliably recognize a location. In short, our algorithm works as follows. In the mapping stage, we manually create an adjacency map of the environment.