Visual Localization across Seasons Using Sequence Matching Based on Multi-Feature Combination

Visual localization is widely used in autonomous navigation system and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). However, visual-based localization in seasonal changing situations is one of the most challenging topics in computer vision and the intelligent vehicle community. The difficulty of this task is related to the strong appearance changes that occur in scenes due to weather or season changes. In this paper, a place recognition based visual localization method is proposed, which realizes the localization by identifying previously visited places using the sequence matching method. It operates by matching query image sequences to an image database acquired previously (video acquired during traveling period). In this method, in order to improve matching accuracy, multi-feature is constructed by combining a global GIST descriptor and local binary feature CSLBP (Center-symmetric local binary patterns) to represent image sequence. Then, similarity measurement according to Chi-square distance is used for effective sequences matching. For experimental evaluation, the relationship between image sequence length and sequences matching performance is studied. To show its effectiveness, the proposed method is tested and evaluated in four seasons outdoor environments. The results have shown improved precision–recall performance against the state-of-the-art SeqSLAM algorithm.