PICCOLO: Point Cloud-Centric Omnidirectional Localization

We present PICCOLO, a simple and efficient algorithm for omnidirectional localization. Given a colored point cloud and a 360
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panorama image of a scene, our objective is to recover the camera pose at which the panorama image is taken. Our pipeline works in an off-the-shelf manner with a single image given as a query and does not require any training of neural networks or collecting ground-truth poses of images. Instead, we match each point cloud color to the holistic view of the panorama image with gradient-descent optimization to find the camera pose. Our loss function, called sampling loss, is point cloud-centric, evaluated at the projected location of every point in the point cloud. In contrast, conventional photometric loss is image-centric, comparing colors at each pixel location. With a simple change in the compared entities, sampling loss effectively overcomes the severe visual distortion of omnidirectional images, and enjoys the global context of the 360
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view to handle challenging scenarios for visual localization. PICCOLO outperforms existing omnidirectional localization algorithms in both accuracy and stability when evaluated in various environments.