We propose a new deep learning based approach for camera relocalization. Our approach localizes a given query image by using a convolutional neural network (CNN) for first retrieving similar database images and then predicting the relative pose between the query and the database images, whose poses are known. The camera location for the query image is obtained via triangulation from two relative translation estimates using a RANSAC based approach. Each relative pose estimate provides a hypothesis for the camera orientation and they are fused in a second RANSAC scheme. The neural network is trained for relative pose estimation in an end-to-end manner using training image pairs. In contrast to previous work, our approach does not require scene-specific training of the network, which improves scalability, and it can also be applied to scenes which are not available during the training of the network. As another main contribution, we release a challenging indoor localisation dataset covering 5 different scenes registered to a common coordinate frame. We evaluate our approach using both our own dataset and the standard 7 Scenes benchmark. The results show that the proposed approach generalizes well to previously unseen scenes and compares favourably to other recent CNN-based methods.
@cite_5: Recent advances in camera relocalization use predictions from a regression forest to guide the camera pose optimization procedure. In these methods, each tree associates one pixel with a point in the scene's 3D world coordinate frame. In previous work, these predictions were point estimates and the subsequent camera pose optimization implicitly assumed an isotropic distribution of these estimates. In this paper, we train a regression forest to predict mixtures of anisotropic 3D Gaussians and show how the predicted uncertainties can be taken into account for continuous pose optimization. Experiments show that our proposed method is able to relocalize up to 40 more frames than the state of the art.
@cite_16: 
@cite_4: RANSAC is an important algorithm in robust optimization and a central building block for many computer vision applications. In recent years, traditionally hand-crafted pipelines have been replaced by deep learning pipelines, which can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. However, RANSAC has so far not been used as part of such deep learning pipelines, because its hypothesis selection procedure is non-differentiable. In this work, we present two different ways to overcome this limitation. The most promising approach is inspired by reinforcement learning, namely to replace the deterministic hypothesis selection by a probabilistic selection for which we can derive the expected loss w.r.t. to all learnable parameters. We call this approach DSAC, the differentiable counterpart of RANSAC. We apply DSAC to the problem of camera localization, where deep learning has so far failed to improve on traditional approaches. We demonstrate that by directly minimizing the expected loss of the output camera poses, robustly estimated by RANSAC, we achieve an increase in accuracy. In the future, any deep learning pipeline can use DSAC as a robust optimization component.
It has also been shown that machine learning methods have potential for providing efficient solutions to the pose estimation problem. Similar to structure-based localization approaches, Shotton al @cite_16 utilize a regression forest to predict a 3D point location for each pixel of an input RGB-D image. Thus, the method establishes 2D-3D matches which are then used to recover 6-DoF camera pose by applying RANSAC. Rather then finding point correspondences, Valentin al @cite_5 propose to exploit the uncertainty of the predicted 3D point locations during pose estimation. Brachmann al @cite_4 propose a differentiable RANSAC method for camera localisation from an RGB image. However, it still requires dense depth maps in the training stage.