Domain-Invariant Similarity Activation Map Contrastive Learning for Retrieval-Based Long-Term Visual Localization

Visual localization is a crucial component in the application of mobile robot and autonomous driving.Image retrieval is an efficient and effective technique in image-based localization methods.Due to the drastic variability of environmental conditions,e.g.,illumination changes,retrievalbased visual localization is severely affected and becomes a challenging problem.In this work,a general architecture is first formulated probabilistically to extract domain-invariant features through multi-domain image translation.Then,a novel gradientweighted similarity activation mapping loss(Grad-SAM)is incorporated for finer localization with high accuracy.We also propose a new adaptive triplet loss to boost the contrastive learning of the embedding in a self-supervised manner.The final coarse-to-fine image retrieval pipeline is implemented as the sequential combination of models with and without Grad-SAM loss.Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the CMU-Seasons dataset.The strong generalization ability of our approach is verified with the RobotCar dataset using models pre-trained on urban parts of the CMU-Seasons dataset.Our performance is on par with or even outperforms the state-of-the-art image-based localization baselines in medium or high precision,especially under challenging environments with illumination variance,vegetation,and night-time images.Moreover,real-site experiments have been conducted to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the coarse-to-fine strategy for localization.