Superpixel Description and Indexing for Visual Loop Closure Detection

Recognizing whether the current place has been visited before or not is an important task in robotic navigation, since it helps to reduce the inconsistencies produced by the inherent noise of navigation sensors. When a camera is used as input for navigation, this process is known as visual loop closure detection. Under this context, in this work we propose a loop closure detection method based on superpixels and a Bag of Words scheme. A novel image description method for superpixels is proposed. Our approach also makes use of the concept of dynamic islands, which allows us to group images close in time and to avoid images taken from the same place to compete among them as loop closure candidates. The proposed method is validated using several outdoor public image sequences and compared to other state-of-the-art solutions.