Semantic Communities from Graph-Inspired Visual Representations of Cityscapes

Abstract

The swift development of autonomous vehicles raises the necessity of semantically mapping the environment by producing distinguishable representations to recognise similar areas. To this end, in this article, we present an efficient technique to cut up a robot’s trajectory into semantically consistent communities based on graph-inspired descriptors. This allows an agent to localise itself in future tasks under different environmental circumstances in an urban area. The proposed semantic grouping technique utilizes the Leiden Community Detection Algorithm (LeCDA), which is a novel and efficient method of low computational complexity and exploits semantic and topometric information from the observed scenes. The presented experimentation was carried out on a novel dataset from the city of Xanthi, Greece (dubbed as Gryphonurban urban dataset), which was recorded by RGB-D, IMU and GNSS sensors mounted on a moving vehicle. Our results exhibit the formulation of a semantic map with visually coherent communities and the realisation of an effective localisation mechanism for autonomous vehicles in urban environments.