Interval Inspired Approach Based on Temporal Sequence Constraints to Place Recognition

Place recognition is an essential task in many robotics applications. Recognizing if the robot is crossing an already visited place may be used to improve its localization and map estimation. A place recognition strategy must be as accurate as possible, despite the challenges related to environment dynamicity. It should avoid generating false positives since even a few erroneous matches may be enough to cause the degradation of the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) process. We propose a novel approach for place recognition inspired by interval analysis theory. Our approach models the known world as a set of intervals based on the robot’s observations. The search to determine whether the current robot location is new or known begins as the robot explores its surroundings. Our approach has three main steps. First, it selects a set of nearest neighbors based on the similarity between the current robot observation and the intervals composing the known world. In the second step, our approach uses temporal constraints to select one element of the set. And finally, the third step is to sweep the selected interval looking for the query best match. We evaluate our proposal by dealing with visual place recognition using only image information and demonstrate its effectiveness using some challenging public datasets.