Visual Localization in the Presence of Appearance Changes Using the Partial Order Kernel

Visual localization across seasons and under varying weather and lighting conditions is a challenging task in robotics. In this paper, we present a new sequence-based approach to visual localization using the Partial Order Kernel (POKer), a convolution kernel for string comparison, that is able to handle appearance changes and is robust to speed variations. We use multiple sequence alignment to construct directed acyclic graph representations of the database image sequences, where sequences of images of the same place acquired at different times are represented as alternative paths in a graph. We then use the POKer to compute the pairwise similarities between these graphs and the query image sequences obtained in a subsequent traversal of the environment, and match the corresponding locations. We evaluated our approach on a dataset which features extreme appearance variations due to seasonal changes. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, where it achieves higher precision and recall than two state-of-the-art baseline methods.