Abstract
In this paper, we propose a mobile robot localization system using appearance based place recognition. Our system uses appearance based place recognition and dead reckoning with Wheel Odometry. We use the theory of the observation likelihood estimation introduced from Fast Appearance Based Mapping (FAB-MAP) for appearance based place recognition. Images collected by a robot produce Bag-of-Words representation and Chow Liu trees. This representation is based on quantized SURF detectors/descriptors. A certain place can be recognized when the collected image matches a reference image coming from the same place in scene database. In addition, problems of appearance based place recognition techniques are solved by using sensor fusion. Experimental results are presented in an outdoor environment. The proposed localization system can achieve the average position error within 25m without GPS in an outdoor environment.
