A Probabilistic Framework for Visual Localization in Ambiguous Scenes

Fereidoon Zangeneh, Leonard Bruns, Amit Dekel, Alessandro Pieropan, Patric Jensfelt

Abstract: Visual localization allows autonomous robots to relocalize when losing track of their pose by matching their current observation with past ones. However, ambiguous scenes pose a challenge for such systems, as repetitive structures can be viewed from many distinct, equally likely camera poses, which means it is not sufficient to produce a single best pose hypothesis. In this work, we propose a probabilistic framework that for a given image predicts the arbitrarily shaped posterior distribution of its camera pose. We do this via a novel formulation of camera pose regression using variational inference, which allows sampling from the predicted distribution. Our method outperforms existing methods on localization in ambiguous scenes. We open-source our approach and share our recorded data sequence at github.com/efreidun/vapor.