LoopNet: Where to Focus? Detecting Loop Closures in Dynamic Scenes

Abstract

Loop closure detection is essential in visual simultaneous localization and mapping systems to recognize previously visited scenes, reducing pose and map estimates uncertainty. However, loop closure detection is highly challenging due to perceptual aliasing and scene variations in real-world environments caused by dynamic objects, changes in viewpoint, and illumination variations. This paper introduces a novel plug-and-play model, LoopNet, to find similarities between scenes via determining key landmarks to focus on without being distracted by scene variations. This proposed multi-scale attention-based Siamese convolutional model learns feature embeddings that focus on the discriminative objects in the scene instead of holistic features. We show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in indoor and outdoor environments while being robust to scene variations and perceptual aliasing.