Title: VLocNet++: Deep Multitask Learning for Semantic Visual Localization and Odometry,
Abstract: Semantic understanding and localization are fundamental enablers of robot
autonomy that have for the most part been tackled as disjoint problems. While
deep learning has enabled recent breakthroughs across a wide spectrum of scene
understanding tasks, its applicability to state estimation tasks has been
limited due to the direct formulation that renders it incapable of encoding
scene-specific constrains. In this work, we propose the VLocNet++ architecture
that employs a multitask learning approach to exploit the inter-task
relationship between learning semantics, regressing 6-DoF global pose and
odometry, for the mutual benefit of each of these tasks. Our network overcomes
the aforementioned limitation by simultaneously embedding geometric and
semantic knowledge of the world into the pose regression network. We propose a
novel adaptive weighted fusion layer to aggregate motion-specific temporal
information and to fuse semantic features into the localization stream based on
region activations. Furthermore, we propose a self-supervised warping technique
that uses the relative motion to warp intermediate network representations in
the segmentation stream for learning consistent semantics. Finally, we
introduce a first-of-a-kind urban outdoor localization dataset with pixel-level
semantic labels and multiple loops for training deep networks. Extensive
experiments on the challenging Microsoft 7-Scenes benchmark and our DeepLoc
dataset demonstrate that our approach exceeds the state-of-the-art
outperforming local feature-based methods while simultaneously performing
multiple tasks and exhibiting substantial robustness in challenging scenarios.