Binary Graph Descriptor for Robust Relocalization on Heterogeneous Data

In this letter, we propose a novelbinary graph descriptor to improve loop detection for visual SLAM systems. Our contribution is twofold: i) a graph embedding technique for generating binary descriptors which conserve both spatial and histogram information extracted from images; ii) a generic mean of combining multiple layers of heterogeneous data into the proposed binary graph descriptor, coupled with a matching and geometric checking method. We also introduce an implementation of our descriptor into an incremental Bag-of-Words (iBoW) structure that improves efficiency and scalability, and propose a method to interpret Deep Neural Network (DNN) results. We evaluate our system on synthetic and real datasets across different lighting and seasonal conditions. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art loop detection frameworks in terms of relocalization precision and computational performance, as well as displays high robustness against cross-condition datasets.