Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Getting Started
   • Dependencies
   • Installation
   • LoGG3D-Net Setup
   • SuperPoint + SuperGlue Setup
   • MixVPR Setup
3. Rosbag Files
   • Office Data
   • Garage Data
4. Usage
   • Option 1: Launch Rosbag file from launch file
   • Option 2: Launch Rosbag file from terminal
   • Launch Evaluation
   • Launch Custom Evaluation
   • Evaluate combination of methods
5. Create own vocabulary for DBoW2
6. Results
   • Distance-based evaluation
   • Distance and angle-based evaluation
   • Combined models evaluation (distance-based)
   • Combined models evaluation (distance and angle-based)
   • Execution time performance

Introduction

This repository was made to perform comparison and evaluation between different approaches for place recognition. The goal is to provide a comprehensive benchmarking environment for researchers and practitioners to analyze the performance of various place recognition methods. The repository contains the following methods:

1. SuperPoint + SuperGlue
2. LoGG3D-Net
3. Scan Context
4. DBoW2
5. MixVPR
6. STD

Getting Started

Dependencies

• ROS (tested with ROS Noetic)
• Boost
• PCL 1.8
• OpenCV
• Eigen3
• DBoW2
• Ceres
• Livox ROS driver

Installation

1. Clone the repository into your catkin workspace:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/place_recog_eval.git

2. Install the required dependencies:

sudo apt-get install ros-$(rosversion -d)-pcl-conversions ros-$(rosversion -d)-pcl-ros ros-$(rosversion -d)-message-filters ros-$(rosversion -d)-image-transport ros-$(rosversion -d)-cv-bridge

3. Build the package:

cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make

4. Source your workspace:

source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

5. Setup Python environment:

pip install -e .

LoGG3D-Net Setup

At first clone LoGG3D-Net repository to scripts/methods/ directory!:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src/Place-recognition-evaluation/scripts/methods/
git clone https://github.com/csiro-robotics/LoGG3D-Net.git LoGG3D_Net

You can create separate environment to install necessary dependencies for LoGG3D-Net.

• Install requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

• Install PyTorch with suitable cudatoolkit version. For example:

pip install torch==1.13.1+cu116 torchvision==0.14.1+cu116 torchaudio==0.13.1 --extra-index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu116

• Install torchsparse-1.4.0

sudo apt-get install libsparsehash-dev
pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/mit-han-lab/torchsparse.git@v1.4.0

• Download LoGG3D-Net pre-trained models

cd scripts/methods/LoGG3D_Net/
wget -O checkpoints.zip https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/G9z6VzR72TRm09S/download
unzip checkpoints.zip

SuperPoint + SuperGlue Setup

1. Install the required dependencies:

pip3 install numpy opencv-python torch matplotlib

2. Download the pretrained models from the SuperGlue repository:

cd scripts/methods/superglue/weights/
wget https://github.com/magicleap/SuperGluePretrainedNetwork/raw/master/models/weights/superglue_indoor.pth
wget https://github.com/magicleap/SuperGluePretrainedNetwork/raw/master/models/weights/superpoint_v1.pth

MixVPR Setup

At first clone MixVPR repository to scripts/methods/ directory!:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src/Place-recognition-evaluation/scripts/methods/
git clone https://github.com/amaralibey/MixVPR.git

You can create separate environment to install necessary dependencies for MixVPR.

• Install requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Download MixVPR pre-trained models here and put it to scripts/methods/MixVPR/ directory.

Rosbag Files

These rosbag files contain data collected at Innopolis University for the purpose of evaluating various place recognition methods. The data is stored in two distinct rosbag files, each representing a different environment: an office room and a laboratory. Both environments feature unique geometries and visual appearances, making them suitable for use as training and testing data.

Each rosbag file contains three topics:

• /Odometry (type: nav_msgs/Odometry): Odometry information estimated by the SLAM algorithm
• /camera/color/image_raw_sync (type: sensor_msgs/Image): RGB images from the Intel Depth Camera D435i
• /livox/lidar_pc (type: sensor_msgs/PointCloud2): Point cloud data from the Livox LIDAR MID-70

Office Data

File: office_double_loop.bag

The office data contains two loops in and around an office room. See the figure below for a visual representation of the trajectory.

Garage Data

File: eight_double_loop.bag

The laboratory data captures a figure-eight-shaped trajectory with two loops within a laboratory environment. See the figure below for a visual representation of the trajectory.

Usage

It's recommended to read rosbag internally to avoid any delays. To do so, set use_rosbag to true in the base.launch file. If you do evaluation on rosbag file, this is the best option to make results reproducible.

Option 1: Launch Rosbag file from launch file

1. In a base.launch file set use_rosbag to true.

2. In config.yaml file set the desired rosbag file pathes.

merge_rosbag_input_path - source rosbag file with point clouds, odometry and images. merge_rosbag_output_path - path to rosbag file with merged point clouds after preprocessing.

3. Launch merge.launch file to merge point clouds from source rosbag file:

roslaunch place_recog_eval merge.launch

Option 2: Launch Rosbag file from terminal

1. In a base.launch file set use_rosbag to false.

2. Run rosbag file in separate terminal:

rosbag play <rosbag_file>

Launch Evaluation

Launch the evaluation node for the desired method:

• For DBoW:

roslaunch place_recog_eval dbow.launch

• For Scan Context:

roslaunch place_recog_eval context.launch

• For LoGG3D-Net:

roslaunch place_recog_eval logg3d.launch

• For SuperPoint + SuperGlue:

roslaunch place_recog_eval superglue.launch

• For MixVPR:

roslaunch place_recog_eval mix_vpr.launch

• For STD:

roslaunch place_recog_eval std.launch

The evaluation results will be printed on the terminal and trajectory path will be saved as an image.

You have the option to modify the threshold or other parameters in the respective launch files. By default, the best parameters for each method have been fine-tuned on office_double_loop.bag. To further customize the settings, you can edit the config.yaml file.

Launch Custom Evaluation

You can modify evaluate.cpp or evaluate.py files to run custom evaluation. It can be useful if you want to find optimal parameters for your method. All you need is to modify getMethods() function and add your method to the list of methods. For example:

To find an optimal threshold for Scan Context just add:

for (double threshold = 0.01; threshold < 0.1; threshold += 0.01)
{
    BaseMethod *method = new ScanContext(threshold, 0.2);
    methods.push_back(method);
}

Then you can run evaluation by launchingevaluate_cpp.launch or evaluate_py.launch files:

roslaunch place_recog_eval evaluate_cpp.launch

or (for Python):

roslaunch place_recog_eval evaluate_py.launch

In the results folder precision-recall curve will be saved as an image.

Evaluate combination of methods

1. Set save_candidates to true in config.yaml file. This will save predicted and real candidates for each method in the results folder.

2. Launch evaluation for each method separately. Depends on angle_consideration parameter, results will be stored in no_angle or with_angle folder in results folder.

3. Run get_results.py script in results folder to get results for combination of methods for each folder (no_angle and with_angle)):

python get_results.py

It's used element-wise multiplication of predicted candidates for each method to get final candidates matrix. Then precision, recall, f1 score and accuracy are calculated for final candidates matrix.

Note: after evaluation for each method separately, ground truth file will be created in results folder (this file looks like this: real_*.txt). You have to be make sure, that all real_*.txt files are the same. If they are different, corresponding error will be printed in the terminal.

Create own vocabulary for DBoW2

1. Run roscore:

roscore

2. Run the vocabulary creator node:

rosrun place_recog_eval dbow_create_vocab

3. Run rosbag file in separate terminal:

rosbag play <rosbag_file>

The resulting vocabulary will be saved in the include/methods/dbow/ directory.

Results

Distance-based evaluation

Method	Precision	Recall	F1 Score
DBoW2	0.946	0.137	0.240
SuperPoint + SuperGlue	0.970	0.320	0.481
Scan Context	0.951	0.178	0.300
LoGG3D-Net	0.792	0.122	0.211
MixVPR	0.786	0.008	0.016
STD	0.750	0.002	0.004

Table 1: Models evaluation on test data (laboratory environment, eight.bag). True positive here is when two points are close to each other (within 3 meters).

Distance and angle-based evaluation

Method	Precision	Recall	F1 Score
DBoW2	0.941	0.324	0.482
SuperPoint + SuperGlue	0.970	0.758	0.851
Scan Context	0.711	0.316	0.437
LoGG3D-Net	0.782	0.285	0.418
MixVPR	0.786	0.019	0.036
STD	0.750	0.005	0.010

Table 2: Models evaluation on test data (laboratory environment). True positive here is when two points are close to each other (within 3 meters) and oriented in the same direction (within 45 degrees).

Combined models evaluation (distance-based)

Method	Precision	Recall	F1 Score
DBoW2 + LoGG3D	0.977	0.060	0.113
DBoW2 + Scan Context	0.990	0.068	0.127
DBoW2 + STD	1.000	0.001	0.001
(S.P. + S.G.) + Scan C.	1.000	0.124	0.220
(S.P. + S.G.) + LoGG3D	0.970	0.116	0.207
(S.P. + S.G.) + STD	1.000	0.002	0.004
MixVPR + Scan C.	1.000	0.006	0.013
MixVPR + LoGG3D	0.714	0.004	0.007
MixVPR + STD	0.000	0.000	0.000

Table 3: Combined models evaluation on test data (laboratory environment). True positive here is when two points are close to each other (within 3 meters). Note: S.P. = SuperPoint, S.G. = SuperGlue.

Combined models evaluation (distance and angle-based)

Method	Precision	Recall	F1 Score
DBoW2 + LoGG3D	0.977	0.142	0.248
DBoW2 + Scan Context	0.990	0.160	0.276
DBoW2 + STD	1.000	0.002	0.003
(S.P. + S.G.) + Scan C.	1.000	0.294	0.454
(S.P. + S.G.) + LoGG3D	0.970	0.275	0.429
(S.P. + S.G.) + STD	1.000	0.005	0.010
MixVPR + Scan C.	1.000	0.015	0.030
MixVPR + LoGG3D	0.714	0.008	0.017
MixVPR + STD	0.000	0.000	0.000

Table 4: Combined models evaluation on test data (laboratory environment). True positive here is when two points are close to each other (within 3 meters) and oriented in the same direction (within 45 degrees). Note: S.P. = SuperPoint, S.G. = SuperGlue.

Execution time performance

Method	Processing unit(s)	Total Duration (s)
DBoW2	CPU	2.82
SuperPoint + SuperGlue	CPU + GPU	359.36
Scan Context	CPU	9.46
LoGG3D-Net	CPU + GPU	9.76
MixVPR	CPU + GPU	1.79
STD	CPU	30.30

Table 5: Execution time performance of each method on 100 frames (i.e., 100 seconds of data).