Indoor Sign-based Visual Localization Method

To solve the problem of localization calculation of intelligent vehicles and the mobile robot in the indoor traffic environment, by exploiting kinds of signs which existed in the indoor environment, a visual localization method is proposed through using BEBLID (Boosted Efficient Binary Local Image Descriptor) algorithm. The proposed method enforces the ability to characterize the whole image by improving the classic BEBLID. In this paper, the localization method consists of an offline stage and an online stage. In the offline stage, a scene sign map is created. In the online stage, the calculation progress is divided into 3 parts, which include holistic and local BEBLID method from current image and image in the scene sign map, closet sign site and closet image calculation by using KNN method, metric calculation by using coordinate information which is stored in the scene sign map. The experiment is conducted in three kinds of indoor scenes, including a teaching building, an office building, and an indoor parking lot. The experiment shows the scene sign recognition rate reached 90%, and the average localization error is less than 1 meter. Compared with the traditional method, the proposed method improves about 10% relative recognition rate with the same test set, which verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.