Salience-guided Ground Factor for Robust Localization of Delivery Robots in Complex Urban Environments

In urban environments for delivery robots, particularly in areas such as campuses and towns, many custom features defy standard road semantic categorizations. Addressing this challenge, our paper introduces a method leveraging Salient Object Detection (SOD) to extract these unique features, employing them as pivotal factors for enhanced robot loop closure and localization. Traditional geometric feature-based localization is hampered by fluctuating illumination and appearance changes. Our preference for SOD over semantic segmentation sidesteps the intricacies of classifying a myriad of non-standardized urban features. To achieve consistent ground features, the Motion Compensate IPM (MC-IPM) technique is implemented, capitalizing on motion for distortion compensation and subsequently selecting the most pertinent salient ground features through moment computations. For thorough evaluation, we validated the saliency detection and localization performances to the real urban scenarios. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/salient-ground-feature/home.