Binary GAN based Approach for Unsupervised Loop Closure Detection in Autonomous Unmanned Systems

摘要

Inspired by generative adversarial network (GAN), we propose a novel unsupervised approach for loop closure detection in autonomous unmanned systems. A binary GAN model dedicated to mobile application scenarios is designed to obtain binary feature descriptors, which are further incorporated into the most commonly used Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) model for loop closure detection. Compared with those hand-crafted features like SIFT and ORB, the performance of loop closure detection in complex environments with strong viewpoint and condition changes can be greatly improved. Compared with existing supervised approach based on convolutional neural network like AlexNet and AMOSNet, the cost-expensive task of supervised data annotation is totally avoided, which make the proposed approach more practical.