GMMLoc: Structure Consistent Visual Localization with Gaussian Mixture Models
This work addresses a domain-specific problem in visual state estimation for robotics or autonomous systems, offering an incremental improvement by integrating structure constraints into existing methods.
The paper tackles the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency in visual localization by incorporating prior structure information, achieving centimeter-level accuracy with minimal computational overhead.
Incorporating prior structure information into the visual state estimation could generally improve the localization performance. In this letter, we aim to address the paradox between accuracy and efficiency in coupling visual factors with structure constraints. To this end, we present a cross-modality method that tracks a camera in a prior map modelled by the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). With the pose estimated by the front-end initially, the local visual observations and map components are associated efficiently, and the visual structure from the triangulation is refined simultaneously. By introducing the hybrid structure factors into the joint optimization, the camera poses are bundle-adjusted with the local visual structure. By evaluating our complete system, namely GMMLoc, on the public dataset, we show how our system can provide a centimeter-level localization accuracy with only trivial computational overhead. In addition, the comparative studies with the state-of-the-art vision-dominant state estimators demonstrate the competitive performance of our method.