Robust place recognition based on salient landmarks screening and convolutional neural network features

Abstract

In this work, we propose a robust place recognition measurement in natural environments based on salient landmark screening and convolutional neural network (CNN) features. First, the salient objects in the image are segmented as candidate landmarks. Then, a category screening network is designed to remove specific object types that are not suitable for environmental modeling. Finally, a three-layer CNN is used to get highly representative features of the salient landmarks. In the similarity measurement, a Siamese network is chosen to calculate the similarity between images. Experiments were conducted on three challenging benchmark place recognition datasets and superior performance was achieved compared to other state-of-the-art methods, including FABMAP, SeqSLAM, SeqCNNSLAM, and PlaceCNN. Our method obtains the best results on the precision–recall curves, and the average precision reaches 78.43%, which is the best of the comparison methods. This demonstrates that the CNN features on the screened salient landmarks can be against a strong viewpoint and condition variations.