TOWARDS SCALABLE, REAL-TIME VISUAL LOCALIZATION THROUGH ANCHOR EXTRACTION AND DETECTION

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "TOWARDS SCALABLE, REAL-TIME VISUAL LOCALIZATION THROUGH ANCHOR
EXTRACTION AND DETECTION"

By

Mr. Chun Ho PARK


Abstract:

Modern applications of visual localization requires carefully balancing the
trade-off between pose estimation accuracy, computational efficiency and
scalability. However, existing methods for visual localization struggle to
perform accurate, real-time localization, especially in large scale
environments. To address this problem, this thesis presents AnchorLoc, a
framework which leverages real-time object detection to detect visual anchors
and optimize the visual localization pipeline to dramatically improve
efficiency and scalability. AnchorLoc automatically extracts stable and
distinct visual anchors from image sequences captured in the environment. These
visual anchors are then detected from the query image and used to optimize the
search space during image retrieval and local feature matching processes.
Additionally, we collect a large scale visual localization dataset comprised of
image sequences and 3D reconstruction of an area within a university campus.
Experimental results reveal that AnchorLoc reduces localization time by 83% on
our campus dataset and by 69% on the Cambridge Landmarks dataset without
significantly degrading the pose estimation accuracy compared to HLoc, an
accurate hierarchical localization method. AnchorLoc is also more accurate and
faster than SLD, a localization method which takes a similar approach at the
keypoint level. Lastly, this thesis suggests research directions for future
development of anchor-based methods for more robust and efficient visual
localization.


Date: 			Wednesday, 31 May 2023

Time: 			5:00pm - 7:00pm

Venue: 			Room 3494
			lifts 25/26

Committee Members: 	Prof. Pan Hui (Supervisor)
			Dr. Tristan Braud (Supervisor)
			Prof. Gary Chan (Chairperson)
			Dr. Long Chen


**** ALL are Welcome ****