The visual camera is an attractive device in beyond visual line of sight (B-VLOS) drone operation, since they are low in size, weight, power, and cost, and can provide redundant modality to GPS failures. However, state-of-the-art visual localization algorithms are unable to match visual data that have a significantly different appearance due to illuminations or viewpoints. This paper presents iSimLoc, a condition/viewpoint consistent hierarchical global re-localization approach. The place features of iSimLoc can be utilized to search target images under changing appearances and viewpoints. Additionally, our hierarchical global re-localization module refines in a coarse-to-fine manner, allowing iSimLoc to perform a fast and accurate estimation.
If you use this code for your research, please cite our papers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06376
@ARTICLE{10035430, author={Yin, Peng and Cisneros, Ivan and Zhao, Shiqi and Zhang, Ji and Choset, Howie and Scherer, Sebastian}, journal={IEEE Transactions on Robotics}, title={iSimLoc: Visual Global Localization for Previously Unseen Environments With Simulated Images}, year={2023}, volume={39}, number={3}, pages={1893-1909}, doi={10.1109/TRO.2023.3238201}}