Score Calculation with Local and Global Features for Visual Place Recognition

Visual place recognition (VPR) seems effective for the localization process in visual navigation of a robot because a robot can recognize locations and poses using only visual information if the accuracy of VPR is sufficient. However, to apply VPR for actual scenarios where multiple locations to be distinguished are in a captured image, the classification accuracy should be improved. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method for likelihood computation in location matching composed of two kinds of components corresponding to local and global features. Experimental results using a novel dataset composed of actual images taken around the course of the Tsukuba Challenge showed that the proposed method improved accuracy by 1–6 % compared to conventional reranking methods using only local features.