Looking Beneath More: A Sequence-based Localizing Ground Penetrating Radar Framework

Localizing ground penetrating radar (LGPR) has been proven to be a promising technology for robot localization in various dynamic environments. However, the extreme scarcity of underground features introduces false candidate matches and brings unique challenges to this task. In this paper, we propose a sequence-based framework for LGPR to address the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first introduce a trainable strategy to extract robust underground features in multi-weather conditions. By further using sequential information, our LGPR system can observe richer underground scene contexts, and the associated multi-frame scans could also improve the performance of underground place recognition. We demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method by comparing it against several recent state-of-the-art baseline methods applied to GPR image tasks. Experimental results on large public and self-collected datasets show that our proposed framework significantly improves the performance of various baselines in different scenarios.