Author(s)

Mengyan Lyu, Xinxin Guo, Kunpeng Zhang, Liye Zhang^*

School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, China.

The task of indoor visual localization, utilizing camera visual information for user pose calculation, was a core component of Augmented Reality (AR) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Existing indoor localization technologies generally used scene-specific 3D representations or were trained on specific datasets, making it challenging to balance accuracy and cost when applied to new scenes. Addressing this issue, this paper proposed a universal indoor visual localization method based on efficient image retrieval. Initially, a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) was employed to aggregate features from intermediate layers of a convolutional neural network, obtaining a global representation of the image. This approach ensured accurate and rapid retrieval of reference images. Subsequently, a new mechanism using Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) was designed to resolve relative pose ambiguity caused by the essential matrix decomposition based on the five-point method. Finally, the absolute pose of the queried user image was computed, thereby achieving indoor user pose estimation. The proposed indoor localization method was characterized by its simplicity, flexibility, and excellent cross-scene generalization. Experimental results demonstrated a positioning error of 0.09 m and 2.14° on the 7Scenes dataset, and 0.15 m and 6.37° on the 12Scenes dataset. These results convincingly illustrated the outstanding performance of the proposed indoor localization method.

Visual Indoor Positioning, Feature Point Matching, Image Retrieval, Position Calculation, Five-Point Method

Lyu, M. , Guo, X. , Zhang, K. and Zhang, L. (2024) A Visual Indoor Localization Method Based on Efficient Image Retrieval. Journal of Computer and Communications, 12, 47-66. doi: 10.4236/jcc.2024.122004.