Off the beaten track: Predicting localisation performance in visual teach and repeat

This paper proposes an appearance-based approach to estimating localisation performance in the context of visual teach and repeat. Specifically, it aims to estimate the likely corridor around a taught trajectory within which a vision-based localisation system is still able to localise itself. In contrast to prior art, our system is able to predict this localisation envelope for trajectories in similar, yet geographically distant locations where no repeat runs have yet been performed. Thus, by characterising the localisation performance in one region, we are able to predict performance in another. To achieve this, we leverage a Gaussian Process regressor to estimate the likely number of feature matches for any keyframe in the teach run, based on a combination of trajectory properties such as curvature and an appearance model of the keyframe. Using data from real traversals, we demonstrate that our approach performs as well as prior art when it comes to interpolating localisation performance based on a number of repeat runs, while also performing well at generalising performance estimation to freshly taught trajectories.