ibow_lcd is a library that can be used to detect loop closures in a sequence of images. Instead of using the typical Bag-of-Words (BoW) scheme, ibow_lcd makes use of an incremental Bags of Binary Words algorithm called OBIndex2, allowing the use of binary descriptors to accelerate the image description process and avoiding the problems that classical BoW approaches present.
ibow_lcd is released as a ROS package, and relies on OpenCV 3.x and Boost libraries as well as OBIndex2 package. It can be used with any binary descriptor computed using the OpenCV format.
Note that ibow_lcd is research code. The authors are not responsible for any errors it may contain. Use it at your own risk!
ibow_lcd is distributed under the terms of the GPL3 License.
The details of the algorithm are explained in the following publication:
ibow_lcd: An Appearance-based Loop Closure Detection Approach using Incremental Bags of Binary Words
Emilio Garcia-Fidalgo and Alberto Ortiz
Submitted to IEEE RA-L and IROS 2018
A preprinted version can be found here. If you use this code, please cite:
@misc{Garcia-Fidalgo2018,
Author = {Emilio Garcia-Fidalgo and Alberto Ortiz},
Title = {{ibow_lcd: An Appearance-based Loop Closure Detection Approach using Incremental Bags of Binary Words}},
Year = {2018},
Eprint = {arXiv:1802.05909}
}
-
First of all, you have to install OBIndex2 and its dependencies as a ROS package.
-
Clone the repository into your workspace:
cd ~/your_workspace/src
git clone http://github.com/emiliofidalgo/ibow_lcd.git
- Compile the package using, as usual, the
catkin_makecommand:
cd ..
catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
- Finally, you can run an example with:
rosrun ibow_lcd demo /directory/of/images
To see an example of how to use the loop closure detector, see the demo file src/main.cc.
If you have problems or questions using this code, please contact the author (emilio.garcia@uib.es). Feature requests and contributions are totally welcome.