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Main Authors: Wilhelm, Aaron, Napp, Nils
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11620
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author Wilhelm, Aaron
Napp, Nils
author_facet Wilhelm, Aaron
Napp, Nils
contents Ground texture localization using a downward-facing camera offers a low-cost, high-precision localization solution that is robust to dynamic environments and requires no environmental modification. We present a significantly improved bag-of-words (BoW) image retrieval system for ground texture localization, achieving substantially higher accuracy for global localization and higher precision and recall for loop closure detection in SLAM. Our approach leverages an approximate $k$-means (AKM) vocabulary with soft assignment, and exploits the consistent orientation and constant scale constraints inherent to ground texture localization. Identifying the different needs of global localization vs. loop closure detection for SLAM, we present both high-accuracy and high-speed versions of our algorithm. We test the effect of each of our proposed improvements through an ablation study and demonstrate our method's effectiveness for both global localization and loop closure detection. With numerous ground texture localization systems already using BoW, our method can readily replace other generic BoW systems in their pipeline and immediately improve their results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_11620
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improved Bag-of-Words Image Retrieval with Geometric Constraints for Ground Texture Localization
Wilhelm, Aaron
Napp, Nils
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Ground texture localization using a downward-facing camera offers a low-cost, high-precision localization solution that is robust to dynamic environments and requires no environmental modification. We present a significantly improved bag-of-words (BoW) image retrieval system for ground texture localization, achieving substantially higher accuracy for global localization and higher precision and recall for loop closure detection in SLAM. Our approach leverages an approximate $k$-means (AKM) vocabulary with soft assignment, and exploits the consistent orientation and constant scale constraints inherent to ground texture localization. Identifying the different needs of global localization vs. loop closure detection for SLAM, we present both high-accuracy and high-speed versions of our algorithm. We test the effect of each of our proposed improvements through an ablation study and demonstrate our method's effectiveness for both global localization and loop closure detection. With numerous ground texture localization systems already using BoW, our method can readily replace other generic BoW systems in their pipeline and immediately improve their results.
title Improved Bag-of-Words Image Retrieval with Geometric Constraints for Ground Texture Localization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11620