Ground Texture Based Localization: Do We Need to Detect Keypoints?

Localization using ground texture images recorded with a downward-facing camera is a promising approach to achieve reliable high-accuracy vehicle positioning. A common way to accomplish the task is to focus on prominent features of the ground texture such as stones and cracks. Our results indicate that with an approximately known camera pose it is sufficient to use arbitrary ground regions, i.e. extracting features at random positions without significant loss in localization performance. Additionally, we propose a real-time capable CPU-only localization method based on this idea, and suggest possible improvements for further research.