Natural, salient image patches for robot localization

This paper addresses a major problem in mobile robot localization. In most approaches to simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) only line and point features are used which easily lead to ambiguities in loop-closing and global relocalization. In this work we propose to use natural, salient image patches as additional high discriminative landmarks to aid in unclear localization scenarios which might occur in modern highly symmetric indoor environments. A new method of landmark extraction is presented as well as a matching method for storing and retrieving the landmarks in a location database.