arXiv subjects

Yanmei Jiao

Publications and source records attributed to Yanmei Jiao.

17 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

G2G: Exploiting Intra-Group Geometry for Inter-Group Pose Estimation

Recovering the relative 6-DoF pose between two image groups underlies cross-sequence relocalization and multi-camera rig odometry. Each group carries known intra-group geometry from visual odometry or rig calibration, and pretrained multi-view backbones already fuse such geometry into visual features. Yet current models treat all views as an unstructured set, leaving cross-group reasoning as the missing piece. We introduce G2G, which keeps the foundation model entirely frozen and adds three lightweight trainable modules to bridge the two groups: a perceiver resampler, a cross-group bridge with merged self-attention, and a multi-frame pose head. The trainable footprint totals about 32M parameters, under 6% of the full model, and is supervised only by relative poses. Across four datasets that span indoor and outdoor simulation, real-world cross-season capture, and zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, G2G attains state-of-the-art accuracy on both tasks, while trainable baselines are retrained with their original supervision. Code and visualizations: https://github.com/WeiYuFei0217/G2G.

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arXiv2026

IntentReact: Guiding Reactive Object-Centric Navigation via Topological Intent

Object-goal visual navigation requires robots to reason over semantic structure and act effectively under partial observability. Recent approaches based on object-level topological maps enable long-horizon navigation without dense geometric reconstruction, but their execution remains limited by the gap between global topological guidance and local perception-driven control. In particular, local decisions are made solely from the current egocentric observation, without access to information beyond the robot's field of view. As a result, the robot may persist along its current heading even when initially oriented away from the goal, moving toward directions that do not decrease the global topological distance. In this work, we propose IntentReact, an intent-conditioned object-centric navigation framework that introduces a compact interface between global topological planning and reactive object-centric control. Our approach encodes global topological guidance as a low-dimensional directional signal, termed intent, which conditions a learned waypoint prediction policy to bias navigation toward topologically consistent progression. This design enables the robot to promptly reorient when local observations are misleading, guiding motion toward directions that decrease global topological distance while preserving the reactivity and robustness of object-centric control. We evaluate the proposed framework through extensive experiments, demonstrating improved navigation success and execution quality compared to prior object-centric navigation methods.

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arXiv2025

Multi-cam Multi-map Visual Inertial Localization: System, Validation and Dataset

Robot control loops require causal pose estimates that depend only on past and present measurements. At each timestep, controllers compute commands using the current pose without waiting for future refinements. While traditional visual SLAM systems achieve high accuracy through retrospective loop closures, these corrections arrive after control decisions were already executed, violating causality. Visual-inertial odometry maintains causality but accumulates unbounded drift over time. To address the distinct requirements of robot control, we propose a multi-camera multi-map visual-inertial localization system providing real-time, causal pose estimation with bounded localization error through continuous map constraints. Since standard trajectory metrics evaluate post-processed trajectories, we analyze the error composition of map-based localization systems and propose a set of evaluation metrics suitable for measuring causal localization performance. To validate our system, we design a multi-camera IMU hardware setup and collect a challenging long-term campus dataset featuring diverse illumination and seasonal conditions. Experimental results on public benchmarks and on our own collected dataset demonstrate that our system provides significantly higher real-time localization accuracy compared to other methods. To benefit the community, we have made both the system and the dataset open source at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Multi-cam-Multi-map-VILO-7993.

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arXiv2023

3D Model-free Visual Localization System from Essential Matrix under Local Planar Motion

Visual localization plays a critical role in the functionality of low-cost autonomous mobile robots. Current state-of-the-art approaches for achieving accurate visual localization are 3D scene-specific, requiring additional computational and storage resources to construct a 3D scene model when facing a new environment. An alternative approach of directly using a database of 2D images for visual localization offers more flexibility. However, such methods currently suffer from limited localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose an accurate and robust multiple checking-based 3D model-free visual localization system to address the aforementioned issues. To ensure high accuracy, our focus is on estimating the pose of a query image relative to the retrieved database images using 2D-2D feature matches. Theoretically, by incorporating the local planar motion constraint into both the estimation of the essential matrix and the triangulation stages, we reduce the minimum required feature matches for absolute pose estimation, thereby enhancing the robustness of outlier rejection. Additionally, we introduce a multiple-checking mechanism to ensure the correctness of the solution throughout the solving process. For validation, qualitative and quantitative experiments are performed on both simulation and two real-world datasets and the experimental results demonstrate a significant enhancement in both accuracy and robustness afforded by the proposed 3D model-free visual localization system.

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arXiv2023

Leveraging BEV Representation for 360-degree Visual Place Recognition

This paper investigates the advantages of using Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation in 360-degree visual place recognition (VPR). We propose a novel network architecture that utilizes the BEV representation in feature extraction, feature aggregation, and vision-LiDAR fusion, which bridges visual cues and spatial awareness. Our method extracts image features using standard convolutional networks and combines the features according to pre-defined 3D grid spatial points. To alleviate the mechanical and time misalignments between cameras, we further introduce deformable attention to learn the compensation. Upon the BEV feature representation, we then employ the polar transform and the Discrete Fourier transform for aggregation, which is shown to be rotation-invariant. In addition, the image and point cloud cues can be easily stated in the same coordinates, which benefits sensor fusion for place recognition. The proposed BEV-based method is evaluated in ablation and comparative studies on two datasets, including on-the-road and off-the-road scenarios. The experimental results verify the hypothesis that BEV can benefit VPR by its superior performance compared to baseline methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first trial of employing BEV representation in this task.

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arXiv2023

DAMS-LIO: A Degeneration-Aware and Modular Sensor-Fusion LiDAR-inertial Odometry

With robots being deployed in increasingly complex environments like underground mines and planetary surfaces, the multi-sensor fusion method has gained more and more attention which is a promising solution to state estimation in the such scene. The fusion scheme is a central component of these methods. In this paper, a light-weight iEKF-based LiDAR-inertial odometry system is presented, which utilizes a degeneration-aware and modular sensor-fusion pipeline that takes both LiDAR points and relative pose from another odometry as the measurement in the update process only when degeneration is detected. Both the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) theory and simulation test are used to demonstrate the higher accuracy of our method compared to methods using a single observation. Furthermore, the proposed system is evaluated in perceptually challenging datasets against various state-of-the-art sensor-fusion methods. The results show that the proposed system achieves real-time and high estimation accuracy performance despite the challenging environment and poor observations.

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arXiv2023

GOOD: General Optimization-based Fusion for 3D Object Detection via LiDAR-Camera Object Candidates

3D object detection serves as the core basis of the perception tasks in autonomous driving. Recent years have seen the rapid progress of multi-modal fusion strategies for more robust and accurate 3D object detection. However, current researches for robust fusion are all learning-based frameworks, which demand a large amount of training data and are inconvenient to implement in new scenes. In this paper, we propose GOOD, a general optimization-based fusion framework that can achieve satisfying detection without training additional models and is available for any combinations of 2D and 3D detectors to improve the accuracy and robustness of 3D detection. First we apply the mutual-sided nearest-neighbor probability model to achieve the 3D-2D data association. Then we design an optimization pipeline that can optimize different kinds of instances separately based on the matching result. Apart from this, the 3D MOT method is also introduced to enhance the performance aided by previous frames. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first optimization-based late fusion framework for multi-modal 3D object detection which can be served as a baseline for subsequent research. Experiments on both nuScenes and KITTI datasets are carried out and the results show that GOOD outperforms by 9.1\% on mAP score compared with PointPillars and achieves competitive results with the learning-based late fusion CLOCs.

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arXiv2022

FEJ-VIRO: A Consistent First-Estimate Jacobian Visual-Inertial-Ranging Odometry

In recent years, Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) has achieved many significant progresses. However, VIO methods suffer from localization drift over long trajectories. In this paper, we propose a First-Estimates Jacobian Visual-Inertial-Ranging Odometry (FEJ-VIRO) to reduce the localization drifts of VIO by incorporating ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging measurements into the VIO framework \textit{consistently}. Considering that the initial positions of UWB anchors are usually unavailable, we propose a long-short window structure to initialize the UWB anchors' positions as well as the covariance for state augmentation. After initialization, the FEJ-VIRO estimates the UWB anchors' positions simultaneously along with the robot poses. We further analyze the observability of the visual-inertial-ranging estimators and proved that there are \textit{four} unobservable directions in the ideal case, while one of them vanishes in the actual case due to the gain of spurious information. Based on these analyses, we leverage the FEJ technique to enforce the unobservable directions, hence reducing inconsistency of the estimator. Finally, we validate our analysis and evaluate the proposed FEJ-VIRO with both simulation and real-world experiments.

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arXiv2022

Map-based Visual-Inertial Localization: Consistency and Complexity

Drift-free localization is essential for autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we address the problem by proposing a filter-based framework, which integrates the visual-inertial odometry and the measurements of the features in the pre-built map. In this framework, the transformation between the odometry frame and the map frame is augmented into the state and estimated on the fly. Besides, we maintain only the keyframe poses in the map and employ Schmidt extended Kalman filter to update the state partially, so that the uncertainty of the map information can be consistently considered with low computational cost. Moreover, we theoretically demonstrate that the ever-changing linearization points of the estimated state can introduce spurious information to the augmented system and make the original four-dimensional unobservable subspace vanish, leading to inconsistent estimation in practice. To relieve this problem, we employ first-estimate Jacobian (FEJ) to maintain the correct observability properties of the augmented system. Furthermore, we introduce an observability-constrained updating method to compensate for the significant accumulated error after the long-term absence (can be 3 minutes and 1 km) of map-based measurements. Through simulations, the consistent estimation of our proposed algorithm is validated. Through real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm runs successfully on four kinds of datasets with the lower computational cost (20% time-saving) and the better estimation accuracy (45% trajectory error reduction) compared with the baseline algorithm VINS-Fusion, whereas VINS-Fusion fails to give bounded localization performance on three of four datasets because of its inconsistent estimation.

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arXiv2022

Translation Invariant Global Estimation of Heading Angle Using Sinogram of LiDAR Point Cloud

Global point cloud registration is an essential module for localization, of which the main difficulty exists in estimating the rotation globally without initial value. With the aid of gravity alignment, the degree of freedom in point cloud registration could be reduced to 4DoF, in which only the heading angle is required for rotation estimation. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate global heading angle estimation method for gravity-aligned point clouds. Our key idea is that we generate a translation invariant representation based on Radon Transform, allowing us to solve the decoupled heading angle globally with circular cross-correlation. Besides, for heading angle estimation between point clouds with different distributions, we implement this heading angle estimator as a differentiable module to train a feature extraction network end- to-end. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in heading angle estimation and show better performance compared with other methods.

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arXiv2021

Toward Consistent Drift-free Visual Inertial Localization on Keyframe Based Map

Global localization is essential for robots to perform further tasks like navigation. In this paper, we propose a new framework to perform global localization based on a filter-based visual-inertial odometry framework MSCKF. To reduce the computation and memory consumption, we only maintain the keyframe poses of the map and employ Schmidt-EKF to update the state. This global localization framework is shown to be able to maintain the consistency of the state estimator. Furthermore, we introduce a re-linearization mechanism during the updating phase. This mechanism could ease the linearization error of observation function to make the state estimation more precise. The experiments show that this mechanism is crucial for large and challenging scenes. Simulations and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and consistency of our global localization framework.

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arXiv2021

Deep Samplable Observation Model for Global Localization and Kidnapping

Global localization and kidnapping are two challenging problems in robot localization. The popular method, Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) addresses the problem by iteratively updating a set of particles with a "sampling-weighting" loop. Sampling is decisive to the performance of MCL [1]. However, traditional MCL can only sample from a uniform distribution over the state space. Although variants of MCL propose different sampling models, they fail to provide an accurate distribution or generalize across scenes. To better deal with these problems, we present a distribution proposal model, named Deep Samplable Observation Model (DSOM). DSOM takes a map and a 2D laser scan as inputs and outputs a conditional multimodal probability distribution of the pose, making the samples more focusing on the regions with higher likelihood. With such samples, the convergence is expected to be more effective and efficient. Considering that the learning-based sampling model may fail to capture the true pose sometimes, we furthermore propose the Adaptive Mixture MCL (AdaM MCL), which deploys a trusty mechanism to adaptively select updating mode for each particle to tolerate this situation. Equipped with DSOM, AdaM MCL can achieve more accurate estimation, faster convergence and better scalability compared to previous methods in both synthetic and real scenes. Even in real environments with long-term changing, AdaM MCL is able to localize the robot using DSOM trained only by simulation observations from a SLAM map or a blueprint map.

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arXiv2020

Robust localization for planar moving robot in changing environment: A perspective on density of correspondence and depth

Visual localization for planar moving robot is important to various indoor service robotic applications. To handle the textureless areas and frequent human activities in indoor environments, a novel robust visual localization algorithm which leverages dense correspondence and sparse depth for planar moving robot is proposed. The key component is a minimal solution which computes the absolute camera pose with one 3D-2D correspondence and one 2D-2D correspondence. The advantages are obvious in two aspects. First, the robustness is enhanced as the sample set for pose estimation is maximal by utilizing all correspondences with or without depth. Second, no extra effort for dense map construction is required to exploit dense correspondences for handling textureless and repetitive texture scenes. That is meaningful as building a dense map is computational expensive especially in large scale. Moreover, a probabilistic analysis among different solutions is presented and an automatic solution selection mechanism is designed to maximize the success rate by selecting appropriate solutions in different environmental characteristics. Finally, a complete visual localization pipeline considering situations from the perspective of correspondence and depth density is summarized and validated on both simulation and public real-world indoor localization dataset. The code is released on github.

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arXiv2020

Improving the generalization of network based relative pose regression: dimension reduction as a regularizer

Visual localization occupies an important position in many areas such as Augmented Reality, robotics and 3D reconstruction. The state-of-the-art visual localization methods perform pose estimation using geometry based solver within the RANSAC framework. However, these methods require accurate pixel-level matching at high image resolution, which is hard to satisfy under significant changes from appearance, dynamics or perspective of view. End-to-end learning based regression networks provide a solution to circumvent the requirement for precise pixel-level correspondences, but demonstrate poor performance towards cross-scene generalization. In this paper, we explicitly add a learnable matching layer within the network to isolate the pose regression solver from the absolute image feature values, and apply dimension regularization on both the correlation feature channel and the image scale to further improve performance towards generalization and large viewpoint change. We implement this dimension regularization strategy within a two-layer pyramid based framework to regress the localization results from coarse to fine. In addition, the depth information is fused for absolute translational scale recovery. Through experiments on real world RGBD datasets we validate the effectiveness of our design in terms of improving both generalization performance and robustness towards viewpoint change, and also show the potential of regression based visual localization networks towards challenging occasions that are difficult for geometry based visual localization methods.

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arXiv2020

Globally optimal consensus maximization for robust visual inertial localization in point and line map

Map based visual inertial localization is a crucial step to reduce the drift in state estimation of mobile robots. The underlying problem for localization is to estimate the pose from a set of 3D-2D feature correspondences, of which the main challenge is the presence of outliers, especially in changing environment. In this paper, we propose a robust solution based on efficient global optimization of the consensus maximization problem, which is insensitive to high percentage of outliers. We first introduce translation invariant measurements (TIMs) for both points and lines to decouple the consensus maximization problem into rotation and translation subproblems, allowing for a two-stage solver with reduced solution dimensions. Then we show that (i) the rotation can be calculated by minimizing TIMs using only 1-dimensional branch-and-bound (BnB), (ii) the translation can be found by running 1-dimensional search for three times with prioritized progressive voting. Compared with the popular randomized solver, our solver achieves deterministic global convergence without depending on an initial value. While compared with existing BnB based methods, ours is exponentially faster. Finally, by evaluating the performance on both simulation and real-world datasets, our approach gives accurate pose even when there are 90\% outliers (only 2 inliers).

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arXiv2020

2-Entity RANSAC for robust visual localization in changing environment

Visual localization has attracted considerable attention due to its low-cost and stable sensor, which is desired in many applications, such as autonomous driving, inspection robots and unmanned aerial vehicles. However, current visual localization methods still struggle with environmental changes across weathers and seasons, as there is significant appearance variation between the map and the query image. The crucial challenge in this situation is that the percentage of outliers, i.e. incorrect feature matches, is high. In this paper, we derive minimal closed form solutions for 3D-2D localization with the aid of inertial measurements, using only 2 pairs of point matches or 1 pair of point match and 1 pair of line match. These solutions are further utilized in the proposed 2-entity RANSAC, which is more robust to outliers as both line and point features can be used simultaneously and the number of matches required for pose calculation is reduced. Furthermore, we introduce three feature sampling strategies with different advantages, enabling an automatic selection mechanism. With the mechanism, our 2-entity RANSAC can be adaptive to the environments with different distribution of feature types in different segments. Finally, we evaluate the method on both synthetic and real-world datasets, validating its performance and effectiveness in inter-session scenarios.

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arXiv2019

LiDAR-Camera Calibration under Arbitrary Configurations: Observability and Methods

LiDAR-camera calibration is a precondition for many heterogeneous systems that fuse data from LiDAR and camera. However, the constraint from common field of view and the requirement for strict time synchronization make the calibration a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel LiDAR-camera calibration method aiming to eliminate these two constraints. Specifically, we capture a scan of 3D LiDAR when both the environment and the sensors are stationary, then move the camera to reconstruct the 3D environment using the sequentially obtained images. Finally, we align 3D visual points to the laser scan based on tightly couple graph optimization method to calculate the extrinsic parameters between LiDAR and camera. Under this design, the configuration of these two sensors are free from the common field of view constraint owing to the extended view from the moving camera. And we also eliminate the requirement for strict time synchronization as we only use the single scan of laser data when the sensors are stationary. We theoretically derive the conditions of minimal observability for our method and prove that the accuracy of calibration is improved by collecting more observations from multiple scattered calibration targets. We validate our method on both simulation platform and real-world datasets. Experiments show that our method achieves higher accuracy than other comparable methods, which is in accordance with our theoretical analysis. In addition, the proposed method is beneficial to not only plane measurement error based chessboard, but also other point measurement error based calibration targets, such as boxes and polygonal boards.

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