Visual Localization Using Global Visual Features and Vanishing Points

Abstract. This paper describes a visual localization approach for mobile robots. Robot localization is performed as location recognition. The approach uses global visual features (e.g. GIST) for image similarity and a geometric verification step using vanishing points. Location recognition is an image search to find the most similar image in the database. To deal with partial occlusions, which lower image similarity and lead to ambiguity, vanishing points are used to ensure that a matching database image was taken from the same viewpoint as the query image from the robot. Our approach will assign a query image to a location learned from a training dataset, to an "Unknown" location or in case of too much uncertainty the algorithm would refrain from a decision. The algorithm was evaluated under the ImageCLEF 2010 RobotVision competition1 . The results on the datasets of this competition are published in this paper.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CLEF
• Authors: Olivier Saurer, Friedrich Fraundorfer, Marc Pollefeys
• Keywords: CLEF 2010, Image, Image Similarity, Information Technology, Location Recognition