Fast loop closure detection using probabilistic integration of pose and appearance similarity

Loop closure detection is a key technique for robots to minimize the accumulated localization and mapping errors after long-time explorations of simultaneous localization and mapping. However, the requirement for efficiency and accuracy performance for mobile robot applications is not well satisfied. In this article, we propose a fast and accurate loop closure detection method by exploiting both pose-based and appearance-based information in a probabilistic manner, inspired by the complementarity between the pose-based and the appearance-based information. Our approach formulates a probability framework combing the pose-based loop closure detection probability and the appearance-based loop closure detection probability. In the proposed framework, the pose-based loop closure detection model is firstly derived from the nonlinear optimization model of odometry. Then the appearance-based loop similarity and the pose-based loop similarity are combined into a joint framework to improve the loop closure detection performance. We implemented our approach using C++ and ROS and thoroughly tested it on the publicly available datasets. The experiments presented in this article suggest that the proposed method can achieve high efficiency and accuracy performance on loop closure detection.