Lazy Data Association for Image Sequences Matching Under Substantial Appearance Changes

Localization is an essential capability for mobile robots and the ability to localize in changing environments is key to robust outdoor navigation. Robots operating over extended periods of time should be able to handle substantial appearance changes such as those occurring over seasons or under different weather conditions. In this paper, we investigate the problem of efficiently coping with seasonal appearance changes in online localization. We propose a lazy data association approach for matching streams of incoming images to a reference image sequence in an online fashion. We present a search heuristic to quickly find matches between the current image sequence and a database using a data association graph. Our experiments conducted under substantial seasonal changes suggest that our approach can efficiently match image sequences while requiring a comparably small number of image to image comparisons.