Fast and Robust Loop-Closure Detection via Convolutional Auto-Encoder and Motion Consensus

Abstract

Loop-closure detection is an indispensable module in the visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) system. It typically consists of three main steps: image representation, loop-closure candidate selection, and loop-closure event verification. This article proposes a novel approach for loop-closure detection. In particular, we first introduce a lightweight convolutional auto-encoder network trained by the deep perceptual similarity loss for image representation. We then propose an image-to-sequence selection approach based on place sequence division and distance-weighted voting for loop-closure candidate selection. Furthermore, we propose a motion vector consensus constraint to improve locality preserving matching, which can be used for efficient loop-closure event verification that is robust for various complex environments. Extensive experiments have been conducted on four publicly available datasets. The results demonstrate that our method is able to achieve better recall performance than the state-of-the-art and meet the real-time requirement of vSLAM systems.