A Simple Hierarchical Pooling Data Structure for Loop Closure

Xiaohan Fei, Konstantine Tsotsos, Stefano Soatto

Abstract: We propose a data structure obtained by hierarchically pooling Bag-of-Words (BoW) descriptors during a sequence of views that achieves average speedups in large-scale loop closure applications ranging from 2 to 20 times on benchmark datasets. Although simple, the method works as well as sophisticated agglomerative schemes at a fraction of the cost with minimal loss of performance.