Self-Supervised Domain Calibration and Uncertainty Estimation for Place Recognition

Abstract: Visual place recognition techniques based on deep learning, which have imposed themselves as the state-of-the-art in recent years, do not generalize well to environments visually different from the training set. Thus, to achieve top performance, it is sometimes necessary to fine-tune the networks to the target environment. To this end, we propose a self-supervised domain calibration procedure based on robust pose graph optimization from Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) as the supervision signal without requiring GPS or manual labeling. Moreover, we leverage the procedure to improve uncertainty estimation for place recognition matches which is important in safety critical applications. We show that our approach can improve the performance of a state-of-the-art technique on a target environment dissimilar from its training set and that we can obtain uncertainty estimates. We believe that this approach will help practitioners to deploy robust place recognition solutions in real-world applications. Our code is available publicly: https://github.com/MISTLab/vpr-calibration-and-uncertainty