Encoding the description of image sequences: A two-layered pipeline for loop closure detection

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel technique for detecting loop closures on a trajectory by matching sequences of images instead of single instances. We build upon well established techniques for creating a bag of visual words with a tree structure and we introduce a significant novelty by extending these notions to describe the visual information of entire regions using Visual-Word-Vectors. The fact that the proposed approach does not rely on a single image to recognize a site allows for a more robust place recognition, and consequently loop closure detection, while reduces the computational complexity for long trajectory cases. We present evaluation results for multiple publicly available indoor and outdoor datasets using Precision-Recall curves, which reveal that our method outperforms other state of the art algorithms.