Shady dealings: Robust, long-term visual localisation using illumination invariance

Abstract

This paper is about extending the reach and endurance of outdoor localisation using stereo vision. At the heart of the localisation is the fundamental task of discovering feature correspondences between recorded and live images. One aspect of this problem involves deciding where to look for correspondences in an image and the second is deciding what to look for. This latter point, which is the main focus of our paper, requires understanding how and why the appearance of visual features can change over time. In particular, such knowledge allows us to better deal with abrupt and challenging changes in lighting. We show how by instantiating a parallel image processing stream which operates on illumination-invariant images, we can substantially improve the performance of an outdoor visual navigation system. We will demonstrate, explain and analyse the effect of the RGB to illumination-invariant transformation and suggest that for little cost it becomes a viable tool for those concerned with having robots operate for long periods outdoors.