Real-time Local Feature with Global Visual Information Enhancement

Local feature provides compact and invariant image representation for various visual tasks. Current deep learning-based local feature algorithms always utilize convolution neural network (CNN) architecture with limited receptive field. Besides, even with high-performance GPU devices, the computational efficiency of local features cannot be satisfactory. In this paper, we tackle such problems by proposing a CNN-based local feature algorithm. The proposed method introduces a global enhancement module to fuse global visual clues in a light-weight network, and then optimizes the network by novel deep reinforcement learning scheme from the perspective of local feature matching task. Experiments on the public benchmarks demonstrate that the proposal can achieve considerable robustness against visual interference and meanwhile run in real time.

Center-of-Mass-based Robust Grasp Pose Adaptation Using RGBD Camera and Force/Torque Sensing

Object dropping may occur when the robotic arm grasps objects with uneven mass distribution due to additional moments generated by objects' gravity. To solve this problem, we present a novel work that does not require extra wrist and tactile sensors and large amounts of experiments for learning. First, we obtain the center-of-mass position of the rod object using the widely fixed joint torque sensors on the robot arm and RGBD camera. Further, we give the strategy of grasping to improve grasp stability. Simulation experiments are performed in "Mujoco". Results demonstrate that our work is effective in enhancing grasping robustness.

Automatic Vocabulary and Graph Verification for Accurate Loop Closure Detection

Localizing pre-visited places during long-term simultaneous localization and mapping, i.e. loop closure detection (LCD), is a crucial technique to correct accumulated inconsistencies. As one of the most effective and efficient solutions, Bag-of-Words (BoW) builds a visual vocabulary to associate features and then detect loops. Most existing approaches that build vocabularies off-line determine scales of the vocabulary by trial-and-error, which often results in unreasonable feature association. Moreover, the accuracy of the algorithm usually declines due to perceptual aliasing, as the BoW-based method ignores the positions of visual features. To overcome these disadvantages, we propose a natural convergence criterion based on the comparison between the radii of nodes and the drifts of feature descriptors, which is then utilized to build the optimal vocabulary automatically. Furthermore, we present a novel topological graph verification method for validating candidate loops so that geometrical positions of the words can be involved with a negligible increase in complexity, which can significantly improve the accuracy of LCD. Experiments on various public datasets and comparisons against several state-of-the-art algorithms verify the performance of our proposed approach.

Discriminative and Semantic Feature Selection for Place Recognition towards Dynamic Environments

Features play an important role in various visual tasks, especially in visual place recognition applied in perceptual changing environments. In this paper, we address the challenges of place recognition due to dynamics and confusable patterns by proposing a discriminative and semantic feature selection network, dubbed as DSFeat. Supervised by both semantic information and attention mechanism, we can estimate pixel-wise stability of features, indicating the probability of a static and stable region from which features are extracted, and then select features that are insensitive to dynamic interference and distinguishable to be correctly matched. The designed feature selection model is evaluated in place recognition and SLAM system in several public datasets with varying appearances and viewpoints. Experimental results conclude that the effectiveness of the proposed method. It should be noticed that our proposal can be readily pluggable into any feature-based SLAM system.

RaP-Net: A Region-wise and Point-wise Weighting Network to Extract Robust Keypoints for Indoor Localization

Image keypoint extraction is an important step for visual localization. The localization in indoor environment is challenging for that there may be many unreliable features on dynamic or repetitive objects. Such kind of reliability cannot be well learned by existing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based feature extractors. We propose a novel network, RaP-Net, which explicitly addresses feature invariability with a region-wise predictor, and combines it with a point-wise predictor to select reliable keypoints in an image. We also build a new dataset, OpenLORIS-Location, to train this network. The dataset contains 1553 indoor images with location labels. There are various scene changes between images on the same location, which can help a network to learn the invariability in typical indoor scenes. Experimental results show that the proposed RaP-Net trained with the OpenLORIS-Location dataset significantly outperforms existing CNN-based keypoint extraction algorithms for indoor localization. The code and data are available at https://github.com/ivipsourcecode/RaP-Net.