Robust Place Recognition Using Illumination-compensated Image-based Deep Convolutional Autoencoder Features

Place recognition is a method for determining whether a robot has previously visited the place it currently observes, thus helping the robot correct its accumulated position error. Ultimately, the robot will travel long distances more accurately. Conventional image-based place recognition uses features extracted from a bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) scheme or pre-trained deep neural network. However, the BoVW scheme does not cope well with environmental changes, and the pre-trained deep neural network is disadvantageous in that its computation time is high. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel place recognition scheme using an illumination-compensated image-based deep convolutional autoencoder (ICCAE) feature. Instead of reconstructing the raw image, the autoencoder designed to extract ICCAE features is trained to reconstruct the image, whose illumination component is compensated in the logarithm frequency domain. As a result, we can extract the ICCAE features based on a convolution layer that is robust to illumination and environmental changes. Additionally, ICCAE features can perform faster feature matching than the features extracted from existing deep networks. To evaluate the performance of ICCAE feature-based place recognition, experiments were conducted using a public dataset that includes various conditions.