Appearance-Based Loop Closure Detection via Locality-Driven Accurate Motion Field Learning

Loop closure detection (LCD) is of significant importance in simultaneous localization and mapping. It represents the robot's ability to recognize whether the current surrounding corresponds to a previously observed one. In this paper, we conduct this task in a two-step strategy: candidate frame selection and loop closure verification. The first step aims to search semantically similar images for the query one using features obtained by Key.Net with HardNet. Instead of adopting the traditional Bag-of-Words strategy, we utilize the aggregated selective match kernel to calculate the similarity between images. Subsequently, based on the potential property of motion field in the LCD scene, we propose a novel feature matching method, i.e., exploiting the smoothness prior and learning the motion field for an image pair in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), to implement loop closure verification. Concretely, we formulate the learning problem into a Bayesian framework with latent variables indicating the true/false correspondences and a mixture model accounting for the distribution of data. Furthermore, we propose a locality-driven mechanism to enhance the local relevance of motion vectors and term the algorithm as locality-driven accurate motion field learning (LAL). To satisfy the requirement of efficiency in the LCD task, we use a sparse approximation and search a suboptimal solution for the motion field in the RKHS, termed as LAL*. Extensive experiments are conducted on public datasets for feature matching and LCD tasks. The quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over the current state-of-the-art, meanwhile showing its potential for long-term visual localization. The codes of LAL and LAL* are publicly available at https://github.com/KN-Zhang/LAL.