Self-Supervised Domain Calibration and Uncertainty Estimation for Place Recognition

Visual place recognition techniques based on deep learning, which have imposed themselves as the state-of-the-art in recent years, do not generalize well to environments visually different from the training set. Thus, to achieve top performance, it is sometimes necessary to fine-tune the networks to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Lajoie, Pierre-Yves, Beltrame, Giovanni
Format Paper Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 14.03.2023
Subjects
Calibration
Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Science - Robotics
Domains
Machine learning
Performance enhancement
Recognition
Robustness
Training
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Summary:Visual place recognition techniques based on deep learning, which have imposed themselves as the state-of-the-art in recent years, do not generalize well to environments visually different from the training set. Thus, to achieve top performance, it is sometimes necessary to fine-tune the networks to the target environment. To this end, we propose a self-supervised domain calibration procedure based on robust pose graph optimization from Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) as the supervision signal without requiring GPS or manual labeling. Moreover, we leverage the procedure to improve uncertainty estimation for place recognition matches which is important in safety critical applications. We show that our approach can improve the performance of a state-of-the-art technique on a target environment dissimilar from its training set and that we can obtain uncertainty estimates. We believe that this approach will help practitioners to deploy robust place recognition solutions in real-world applications. Our code is available publicly: https://github.com/MISTLab/vpr-calibration-and-uncertainty
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2203.04446