FlexPRNet: A Flexible and Effective Network for Place Recognition Using Different Sensor Modalities
摘要
Place recognition plays an important role in computer vision, robotics, and autonomous driving, which aims to determine whether an autonomous vehicle has reached a previously visited scene. Most existing methods rely on a single observation and are limited to a specific sensor modality, which hinders their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel RGB-D place recognition framework, called FlexPRNet, that can flexibly work on different sensor modalities by employing a newly designed two-branch (RGB and point-cloud) encoder to exploit spatio-temporal information of adjacent observations to better generate descriptors of places in real-world dynamic environments. Noteworthy, our encoder can work on both indoor and outdoor scenarios. These descriptors are then fed into Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNN) optimized with a triplet loss for place recognition. From the experimental results, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on average up to 3% recall@1 in several place recognition benchmarks. The implementation of our method will be made publicly available.