Joel A. Hesch

Simon Lynen, Bernhard Zeisl, Dror Aiger et al.

The overarching goals in image-based localization are scale, robustness and speed. In recent years, approaches based on local features and sparse 3D point-cloud models have both dominated the benchmarks and seen successful realworld deployment. They enable applications ranging from robot navigation, autonomous driving, virtual and augmented reality to device geo-localization. Recently end-to-end learned localization approaches have been proposed which show promising results on small scale datasets. However the positioning accuracy, scalability, latency and compute & storage requirements of these approaches remain open challenges. We aim to deploy localization at global-scale where one thus relies on methods using local features and sparse 3D models. Our approach spans from offline model building to real-time client-side pose fusion. The system compresses appearance and geometry of the scene for efficient model storage and lookup leading to scalability beyond what what has been previously demonstrated. It allows for low-latency localization queries and efficient fusion run in real-time on mobile platforms by combining server-side localization with real-time visual-inertial-based camera pose tracking. In order to further improve efficiency we leverage a combination of priors, nearest neighbor search, geometric match culling and a cascaded pose candidate refinement step. This combination outperforms previous approaches when working with large scale models and allows deployment at unprecedented scale. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a proof-of-concept system localizing 2.5 million images against models from four cities in different regions on the world achieving query latencies in the 200ms range.

Ryan C. DuToit, Joel A. Hesch, Esha D. Nerurkar et al.

The objective of this paper is to provide consistent, real-time 3D localization capabilities to mobile devices navigating within previously mapped areas. To this end, we introduce the Cholesky-Schmidt-Kalman filter (C-SKF), which explicitly considers the uncertainty of the prior map, by employing the sparse Cholesky factor of the map's Hessian, instead of its dense covariance--as is the case for the Schmidt-Kalman filter (SKF). By doing so, the C-SKF has memory requirements typically linear in the size of the map, as opposed to quadratic for storing the map's covariance. Moreover, and in order to bound the processing needs of the C-SKF (between linear and quadratic in the size of the map), we introduce a relaxation of the C-SKF algorithm, the sC-SKF, which operates on the Cholesky factors of independent sub-maps resulting from dividing the trajectory and observations used for constructing the map into overlapping segments. Lastly, we assess the processing and memory requirements of the proposed C-SKF and sC-SKF algorithms, and compare their positioning accuracy against other approximate map-based localization approaches that employ measurement-noise-covariance inflation to compensate for the map's uncertainty.