Abstract
We aim to achieve robust vision-based localization for outdoor mobile robots. One of the difficulties in outdoor visual localization is to overcome severe illumination conditions. In strong sunlight, ordinary cameras suffer from under or over exposure because of their limited dynamic range. Recently, cameras having a wide dynamic range (HDR cameras) have been available. In this paper, we evaluate our localization system using an HDR camera. We carried out several experiments: a) how much under or over exposures can be suppressed, b) robustness of detecting and matching SIFT keypoints, c) accuracy and robustness of outdoor localization. We demonstrate that HDR cameras can significantly improve the performance of visual localization under drastic illumination changes.
