• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.120-128
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• 2012

The loop closure problem is one of the most challenging issues in the vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping community. It requires the robot to recognize a previously visited place from current camera measurements. While the loop closure often relies on visual bag-of-words based on point features in the previous works, however, in this paper we propose a line-based method to solve the loop closure in the corridor environments. We used both the floor line and the anchored vanishing point as the loop closing feature, and a two-step loop closure algorithm was devised to detect a known place and perform the global pose correction. We propose an anchored vanishing point as a novel loop closure feature, as it includes position information and represents the vanishing points in bi-direction. In our system, the accumulated heading error is reduced using an observation of a previously registered anchored vanishing points firstly, and the observation of known floor lines allows for further pose correction. Experimental results show that our method is very efficient in a structured indoor environment as a suitable loop closure solution.