text: This paper presents an approach for semantic place categorization using data obtained from RGB cameras. Previous studies on visual place recognition and classification have shown that, by considering features derived from pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in combination with part-based classification models, high recognition accuracy can be achieved, even in presence of occlusions and severe viewpoint changes. Inspired by these works, we propose to exploit local deep representations, representing images as set of regions applying a Na " i ve Bayes Nearest Neighbor (NBNN) model for image classification. As opposed to previous methods where CNNs are merely used as feature extractors, our approach seamlessly integrates the NBNN model into a fully-convolutional neural network. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms previous methods based on pre-trained CNN models and that, when employed in challenging robot place recognition tasks, it is robust to occlusions, environmental and sensor changes.
  @cite_25: With the recent success of visual features from deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) in visual robot self-localization, it has become important and practical to address more general self-localization scenarios. In this paper, we address the scenario of self-localization from images with small overlap. We explicitly introduce a localization difficulty index as a decreasing function of view overlap between query and relevant database images and investigate performance versus difficulty for challenging cross-view self-localization tasks. We then reformulate the self-localization as a scalable bag-of-visual-features (BoVF) scene retrieval and present an efficient solution called PCA-NBNN, aiming to facilitate fast and yet discriminative correspondence between partially overlapping images. The proposed approach adopts recent findings in discriminativity preserving encoding of DCNN features using principal component analysis (PCA) and cross-domain scene matching using naive Bayes nearest neighbor distance metric (NBNN). We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed PCA-NBNN framework frequently achieves comparable results to previous DCNN features and that the BoVF model is significantly more efficient. We further address an important alternative scenario of “self-localization from images with NO overlap” and report the result.
  @cite_6: We propose a discriminative compact scene descriptor for single-view cross-season place recognition. Unlike previous bag-of-words approaches which rely on a library of vector quantized visual features, the proposed scene descriptor is based on a library of raw image data (such as available visual experience, images shared by other colleague robots, and publicly available image data on the web) that is directly mined to find nearest neighbor (NN) visual features (i.e., landmarks) for effectively explaining the input image. Our scene matcher adopts naive Bayes nearest neighbor (NBNN) techniques, where (1) raw visual features are used without vector quantization, and (2) image-to-class (rather than image-to-image) distance is used for scene comparison. Finally, we acquire a challenging cross-season place recognition dataset and validate the effectiveness of the proposed scene descriptor
  @cite_12: Since Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the leading learning paradigm in visual recognition, Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbor (NBNN)-based classifiers have lost momentum in the community. This is because (1) such algorithms cannot use CNN activations as input features, (2) they cannot be used as final layer of CNN architectures for end-to-end training, and (3) they are generally not scalable and hence cannot handle big data. This paper proposes a framework that addresses all these issues, thus bringing back NBNNs on the map. We solve the first by extracting CNN activations from local patches at multiple scale levels, similarly to [13]. We address simultaneously the second and third by proposing a scalable version of Naive Bayes Non-linear Learning (NBNL, [7]). Results obtained using pre-trained CNNs on standard scene and domain adaptation databases show the strength of our approach, opening a new season for NBNNs.
summary: Recent works have also shown that the NBNN can be successfully employed for place recognition and categorization tasks @cite_12 @cite_6 @cite_25 . Kanji @cite_6 introduced a NBNN scene descriptor for cross-seasonal place recognition. In a later work @cite_25 , Kanji extended this approach by integrating CNN-based features and PCA, deriving a PCA-NBNN model for addressing the problem of self-localization in case of images with small view overlap. Kuzborskij @cite_12 proposed a multi-scale parametric version of the NBNN classifier and demonstrated its effectiveness in combination with precomputed CNN descriptors for scene recognition. Our work is inspired by @cite_12 . However, the proposed learning model is based on a fully-convolutional network which can be trained in an end-to-end manner. Therefore, it is significantly faster and more accurate than @cite_12 .