Towards a Robust Visual Place Recognition in Large-Scale vSLAM Scenarios Based on a Deep Distance Learning

The application of deep learning is blooming in the field of visual place recognition, which plays a critical role in visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) applications. The use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve better performance than handcrafted feature descriptors. However, visual place recognition is still a challenging task due to two major problems, i.e., perceptual aliasing and perceptual variability. Therefore, designing a customized distance learning method to express the intrinsic distance constraints in the large-scale vSLAM scenarios is of great importance. Traditional deep distance learning methods usually use the triplet loss which requires the mining of anchor images. This may, however, result in very tedious inefficient training and anomalous distance relationships. In this paper, a novel deep distance learning framework for visual place recognition is proposed. Through in-depth analysis of the multiple constraints of the distance relationship in the visual place recognition problem, the multi-constraint loss function is proposed to optimize the distance constraint relationships in the Euclidean space. The new framework can support any kind of CNN such as AlexNet, VGGNet and other user-defined networks to extract more distinguishing features. We have compared the results with the traditional deep distance learning method, and the results show that the proposed method can improve the performance by 19–28%. Additionally, compared to some contemporary visual place recognition techniques, the proposed method can improve the performance by 40%/36% and 27%/24% in average on VGGNet/AlexNet using the New College and the TUM datasets, respectively. It’s verified the method is capable to handle appearance changes in complex environments.