Scalable Representation Learning for Long-Term Augmented Reality-Based Information Delivery in Collaborative Human-Robot Perception

Augmented reality (AR)-based information delivery has been attracting an increasing attention in the past few years to improve communication in human-robot teaming. In the long-term use of AR systems for collaborative human-robot perception, one of the biggest challenges is to perform place and scene matching under long-term environmental changes, such as dramatic variations in lighting, weather and vegetation across different times of the day, months, and seasons. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel representation learning approach that learns a scalable long-term representation model that can be used for place and scene matching in various long-term conditions. Our approach is formulated as a regularized optimization problem, which selects the most representative scene templates in different scenarios to construct a scalable representation of the same place that can exhibit significant long-term environment changes. Our approach adaptively learns to select a small subset of the templates to construct the representation model, based on a user-defined representativeness threshold, which makes the learned model highly scalable to the long-term variations in real-world applications. To solve the formulated optimization problem, a new algorithmic solver is designed, which is theoretically guaranteed to converge to the global optima. Experiments are conducted using two large-scale benchmark datasets, which have demonstrated the superior performance of our approach for long-term place and scene matching.