Visual Place Recognition with Repetitive Structures

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We detect groups of repeated features (shown in different colors), and use the number of the repetitions to adapt the weights of the features in the bag-of-visual words model: (1) repetitive features implicitly provide soft-assignment and (2) truncating their weights prevents them from dominating the matching score.

Authors: Akihiko Torii, Josef Sivic, Tomas Pajdla, Masatoshi Okutomi

Abstract: Repeated structures such as building facades, fences or road markings often represent a significant challenge for place recognition. Repeated structures are notoriously hard for establishing correspondences using multi-view geometry. Even more importantly, they violate the feature independence assumed in the bag-of-visual-words representation which often leads to over-counting evidence and significant degradation of retrieval performance. In this work we show that repeated structures are not a nuisance but, when appropriately represented, they form an important distinguishing feature for many places. We describe a representation of repeated structures suitable for scalable retrieval. It is based on robust detection of repeated image structures and a simple modification of weights in the bag-of-visual-word model. Place recognition results are shown on datasets of street-level imagery from Pittsburgh and San Francisco demonstrating significant gains in recognition performance compared to the standard bag-of-visual-words baseline and more recently proposed burstiness weighting.

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Citation
 

Akihiko Torii, Josef Sivic, Masatoshi Okutomi, Tomas Pajdla.
Visual Place Recognition with Repetitive Structures.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 37, no. 11. pp.2346-2359, November, 2015.
 
Akihiko Torii, Josef Sivic, Tomas Pajdla, Masatoshi Okutomi.
Visual Place Recognition with Repetitive Structures.
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 2013.

BibTeX

@article{Torii-PAMI2015,
author = {Torii, A. and Sivic, J. and Okutomi, M. and Pajdla, T.},
title = {Visual Place Recognition with Repetitive Structures},
booktitle = {PAMI},
year = {2015},
}

 
@inproceedings{Torii-CVPR2013,
author = {Torii, A. and Sivic, J. and Pajdla, T. and Okutomi, M.},
title = {Visual Place Recognition with Repetitive Structures},
booktitle = {CVPR},
year = {2013},
}

Code: Repttile detection and BoVW with adaptive assignment (ver03)
Repttile detection and BoVW with adaptive assignment (ver04 with yael_v438)

Data: Available on request.

Funding: JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 24700161, De-Montes FP7-SME-2011-285839 project, MSR-INRIA laboratory and EIT-ICT labs.

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