We present a method of improving visual place recognition and metric
localisation under very strong appear- ance change. We learn an invertable
generator that can trans- form the conditions of images, e.g. from day to
night, summer to winter etc. This image transforming filter is explicitly
designed to aid and abet feature-matching using a new loss based on SURF
detector and dense descriptor maps. A network is trained to output synthetic
images optimised for feature matching given only an input RGB image, and these
generated images are used to localize the robot against a previously built map
using traditional sparse matching approaches. We benchmark our results using
multiple traversals of the Oxford RobotCar Dataset over a year-long period,
using one traversal as a map and the other to localise. We show that this
method significantly improves place recognition and localisation under changing
and adverse conditions, while reducing the number of mapping runs needed to
successfully achieve reliable localisation.

本文提出了一种通过学习可逆的生成器将图像从一种条件转换到另一种的方法，以此改善在外观强烈变化的情况下的视觉场所识别和度量本地化效果，并基于 SURF 检测器和密集描述符映射的新损失进行特征匹配。数据测试表明，这种方法能够在减少映射运行次数的同时，在多种环境下显著提高地点识别和定位的效果。